My PeNoReMos, or: How I Learned to Read while Parenting a Baby

I owe NaNoWriMo an apology.

Two autumns ago, I wrote a thousand words or so poo-pooing the entire idea, mostly because a detailed perusal of nanowrimo.org failed to turn up any editing advice. It was all, "you go, writer! write that novel! let it be as bad as it needs to be!" without any "and then here's the year's worth of work you'll need to do to clean it up."

And then, last November, I signed up. I had a four-month-old daughter and a middle-grade novel I'd outlined in the two weeks between her due date and when she was actually born, and writing 1,600-odd words a day during naptime seemed like a good way to jump back into writing daily. (I was wrong, but more on that later.) To my surprise, long past November I kept getting NaNoWriMo e-mails full of support for next steps: revising; finding/creating a critique group; querying; self-publishing if you're up for that. So, I was totally wrong that NaNoWriMo treats writing a novel as though the first draft were all. It turns out they do provide resources for getting from first draft to finished book. Oops.

NaNoWriMo would have even been fun, if I'd actually managed to write--at all--during that month. Turns out just when you're trying to get your four-month-old to nap in her own cot is not the best time to plan on writing two-three hours a day. Who knew?

But all was not lost. Instead of National Novel Writing Month, I instituted a new goal just for myself: my Personal Novel Reading Month. Like many a new parent, I had gotten into a bad internet habit. Since I didn't have the willpower or discipline or energy to get back to writing just yet, I decided I could at least make sure I read something besides blog posts and facebook updates. And so I gave myself a strict limit on naptime web-surfing, and spent the rest of my free time reading books.

Clearly, we passed on the
reading gene.

It's a thing I did before I was a mom. Since we moved to Dublin when our daughter was six weeks old, I've been building a whole new life from scratch, rather than incorporating parenthood into the life I already had. At times it's felt like the Me I'd gotten to know and love over 38 years had been obliterated by the changes in my life since my daughter was born. I desperately wanted some way of reclaiming that old self, and felt as though the Irish Sea was between me and all of my options: I wanted to grab a drink with an old friend, but they were all in London or New York; I was ready to get back to my former volunteer work, at least in a limited way, but the school where I volunteered is in London; I would have loved to go to choir practice and sing the Bach St John Passion this spring, but I always did that with the St Paul Cathedral Chorus - in London.

In part because I had a new baby, finding new friends, work, and hobbies in my new home was a much bigger job than I had the energy for (see my previous post). It didn't help that, as I found out last week, I've been severely anaemic for pretty much all of 2013. Now that I'm taking iron supplements I feel like I can conquer the world, or at least stay awake past nine at night; but from January through May just getting to the end of the day felt like a Herculean accomplishment.

Reading, though. Reading I could do. Thanks to the iPhone, whatever book I was reading would fit in my pocket and could be pulled out and read as soon as the baby's eyes drifted closed, especially during that three-month stretch when she was almost always sick and could only sleep comfortably in someone's arms. My daughter's long-running head cold had me reading three, even four hours a day, and now that she's better I'm in the habit and still manage at least an hour over the course of the day.

The best part: for the first time in years, I feel like I'm reading purely for enjoyment. Not with enjoyment as a by-product of keeping up with what's current in my field, or picking books to assign, or analysing the writer's craft. I'm reading what I want to, because I want to, and those other things are the side benefits.

So, what have I been reading in my copious spare time? So glad you asked!

(The Best of the) Books I've Read in the last Six Months, In No Particular Order:

Narrative Nonfiction
Okay, so I'm not reading exclusively novels.

Fraud and Half Empty by David Rakoff. Man, I wish I'd known about this essayist before he died - the memorial episode on This American Life is a hell of a way to learn about work I should have been reading all along. Rakoff had an interesting life, in a low-key sort of way - he once played Freud in a department store Christmas window display - and makes it seem... not relatable, but as though it's beside the point whether you relate to it or not. He is going to write beautiful sentences, paragraphs, pages, and you're going to feel your neurons rearrange themselves as you read them. Don't take my word for it: go read "Isn't it Romantic?" from Half Empty, and see if you can ever again listen to the opening song from Rent without feeling distinctly uncomfortable.

A Parisian martini!

Paris, I Love You, But You're Bringing Me Down by Rosencrans Baldwin. An expat memoir! I read this on vacation in France and it was a very effective inoculation against the "why can't we get posted here?" wistfulness I usually get on visits to Paris. Frankly, I want to read his wife's memoir. While Baldwin was working at a glamorous advertising agency on assignments that sent him to, say, villas in Bermuda to interview Sean Connery, his wife was writing away in an un-airconditioned apartment with construction on three, then four, then all six sides. And she couldn't get a job to get out of the house because of her dependent visa, and they couldn't afford to move because they were living on one income. At least Baldwin is sensitive enough to her predicament that this is the major detail I remember from the book.

Novels! For the Young (but old folks should read them, too)

The Lucy Variations by Sara Zarr. Oh, how I wish this book had been there for me when I was a teenager. Such a familiar problem (the challenge of being true to both your art and your life) in such a rarified world (not only can the family in the book fly the best piano teachers over from Russia and get them US citizenship, they also have a full-time private cook). I got so worried about the title character I had to put the book down at several points and take some deep breaths, and I practically cheered at the very-satisfying ending. Zarr also includes a playlist at the end of the book, and any day now I'm going to go through iTunes and re-create it.

Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell. I had to read this in small chunks. Not because the baby interrupted, but because I needed to absorb all the wonderfulness a bit at a time - and since I was pretty sure the ending wasn't going to be unambiguously happy, I didn't want to get there too fast. I wonder if I would have had the guts to be friends with Eleanor or Park if I had been in high school with them. I also wonder when Rowell's next book is coming out, and how extensive a back catalogue I have to enjoy until then.

Second Chance Summer by Morgan Matson. A family goes back to their old lakeside vacation house for one last summer. Someday, you may read this book. You may find yourself maybe, say, 50 pages from finishing it as you are on your way to run errands, which will also involve having lunch out, by yourself. You may think to yourself, "I will bring this book with me and finish it over lunch." Do not do this. Unless you are comfortable with waiters seating people far away from you and giving you a wide berth while you hold your hand over your mouth and choke back sobs.

The Diviners by Libba Bray. This is so not my kind of book. Look at those other three: down-to-earth novels set in the real world, about teenagers facing heartbreaking choices. Not a whiff of the paranormal. I downloaded this one because it was Halloween and I needed to start my PeNoReMo somewhere, and for some reason I thought that meant I should read something scary. And oh, it is. Ouija Boards, and scholars of the supernatural! Would-be flappers! Demonic con men! Really gruesome murders! And a race against a heavily-portentous comet! All things I usually avoid in my reading; all things that Bray's writing, plotting and pacing made thoroughly enjoyable in this one. And now I can't wait for the next in the series.

Novels! For the Old (but young folks might enjoy; who knows? My favorite book when I was fifteen was The Prince of Tides.)

The Ten-Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer. You thought I was going to recommend The Interestings, didn't you? Like everybody else? Fooled you! Actually, I started to, but then I realized I wouldn't tell you anything you haven't already read. Instead, I'm going to divert your attention to a 2008 novel by the same author, about a group of women trying to figure out what to do with their lives now that the kids they left the workforce to raise are turning ten. I was almost halfway through the book before I figured out what the actual plot (as opposed to the situation) was - and I didn't care. I'm a sucker for a beautiful, honest moment, especially a rueful one, and this novel is full of them. It is also, once I realized what was actually happening, really beautifully structured. I'm also a sucker for craft. (Be warned that if you have any musical ear at all, you will find yourself with the phrase "Rise, sorrow, 'neath the saffron sister tree" going through your head at odd moments.)

Where'd You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple. I hadn't heard of this book - an epistolary novel about gossip and intrigue among the parents and administrators at an elite Seattle school - until it started showing up on Best of 2012 lists. Those lists were right. I didn't see a single element of this book coming, but they all made perfect sense once they showed up. Plus, the prose is snappy and crisp and the reading experience just flat-out enjoyable.

Have you read any of these? What did you think? What should I read next (I ask, as if my to-be-read pile wasn't in serious danger of swamping my nightstand)?

The Expat Survival Kit III: One Year On

Hi Everybody!

Most of you are here, reading this, because you know me. Some of you are here because you've Googled "expat survival kit", or some variation thereof. This post is for all of you. (If you're here because you're looking for pictures of Egypt, that post is here.)

When last we met, I'd written two posts full of everything I've learned about moving to a new place, particularly a foreign country, without a job or any friends outside of your immediate family. Then I had a baby(!!!), moved from London to Dublin, and went into blog silence for... a year. Sorry about that. See above re: baby.

So. Now that I've been in Dublin for almost a year, how'm I doing? Am I taking my own advice? Is it working?

Well, I'll say this, I'm really glad I wrote that post in April last year. I still believe, intellectually, that it's much better in the long run to dig in and make yourself at home in the new place. But in my privileged position of having lived in the new place until it was no longer new, I'd forgotten what that first bit was really like, and how often it would be tempting to just put my head down and kill time until the next move. And I was unbelievably naive, in that I assumed having a baby would make feeling at home in a new place easier. (All you other parents can take a break to laugh hysterically now. I know, you're laughing with me, not at me.) I have needed my own pep talk from time to time.

Anyway.

Efforts aimed at feeling at home in Dublin:

I. The Irish Classes
The Irish accent differs from the American accent very differently than the British accent does. British English and American English are the same language, it's just they've evolved some differences in the last 300 years. Irish English, on the other hand, is English translated from Irish. So I figured the place to start in getting acclimated to Ireland, was to learn why people talk the way they do.

This was a ton of fun. I made sure Gino could come home by six every Wednesday night, and took myself off to the Conradh na Gaeilge in Dublin 2 for their Beginners Irish Class. I didn't learn much Irish, unfortunately: when I tried to speak it with a Dubliner, the response was invariably, "oh, gosh, I haven't thought about that since school, I've forgotten everything" (and when we went to the West, where Irish is still spoken as a first language, everyone I interacted with was from Poland). But I did learn enough to say "hello" and "thank you" and "it's raining" and "I have one daughter" and "a pint of Guinness, please" and about sixteen variations on "good-bye." And I gained at least glancing familiarity with the way language works around here, which means I'm less likely to need to do mental gymnastics to work out what the taxi driver has just said to me.

Of course, the best part was the tea and biscuit (tae agus briosca) break. The beginners were allowed to speak English in the otherwise Irish-only bar under the classroom building, so we actually got a chance to chat - a very important feature in the Class You Take as a New Expat. I even made a friend! We went out for a drink after class, and everything! Then she moved back to New York the week after the class ended. Oops.

I didn't sign up for the next term of classes, and I'm starting to think this was a mistake. It's not that I need to learn Irish in order to live here (and one two-hour class a week is not a good way to learn a language from scratch, anyway), but it was really the only thing I did that wasn't about being a mother. Completely aside from the tea and biscuits, it was really nice to have two or three hours a week when the thing I had in common with everybody was "we're all learning something new," and not "we all have babies at home."

II. The Gym
I finally found a gym with childcare! It's a half-hour walk away (I'll be honest, I call a taxi to get there about 2/3 of the time - I really need to learn how to drive on the left. And get a car), but I can sign my baby up in advance for up to two hours at a time, which is just exactly enough time to do both cardio and weights and take a shower after! The club has a cafe, as well - once when I'd pulled a muscle and knew working out would be counter-productive, I dropped my daughter in the creche, went to the cafe, and added 1000 words to the novel I'm (very slowly) writing.

III. The Expat Group
This... didn't happen. I know, I know, I said it was so important and then I didn't do it. I looked them up and the meetings were way out in a different part of the suburbs than I live in (and so very hard to get to without a car), and I didn't have childcare for the meeting times, so I just didn't join. However! In a fit of desperation I've joined meetup.com, and they have their own expat group there, and one of these days I will bite the bullet and join it. And maybe the "Dublin Writers" and "Dublin Book Club" groups, while I'm at it.

IV. The Playgroup
I'm still doing this, actually. My daughter, almost eleven months old, has moved from the "Babies" class to the "Wobblers" class, which is much smaller because most of the other moms from Babies have gone back to work by now. (Is "Wobblers" - the stage between "Babies" and "Toddlers" - a thing where you live? I'd never heard it before I moved to Ireland, but then, I'd never been a parent before I moved to Ireland, either.) It's not all that exciting - some singing songs, some playing with bubbles, some puppets. It's just really nice, not only to go play with other kids and moms, but to have an hour every week when someone else is in charge. And almost every time, at least a couple people will be up for going out to lunch after. It's almost like having a social life! Of course, it's a social life where all attempts at conversation have to be balanced with the need to keep our kids from hitting each other with their toy phones, but still. I've become close to a couple of women in particular from the class - those of us who didn't go back to work rather banded together - and I hope someday we'll get to go out, child-free, for that glass of wine we all admit to wanting when we're ordering coffees and Diet Cokes to go with our bagel sandwiches.

Which brings me to...

The Snag

There was one big thing I didn't account for when we moved to Dublin: that when you have a baby at the same time that you move to a new place, the only people anyone wants to set you up with are other new moms. There's no "oh, she sings too, she'll know which choirs you might be interested in" or "you're both teachers, you can talk shop." Anytime anyone gives you someone else's number, it's because "she has a baby your baby's age!"

At first, I thought this was just going to be boring, because we'd have to have the "baby pooping/sleeping/feeding" discussion over and over. And to an extent that's been true, though it turns out that (a) that conversation's a lot more interesting when it's about your baby's poop/sleep/food and (b) usually in the process of those conversations you actually learn a good bit about other things you have in common with another mum. But there's a much bigger issue I hadn't anticipated.

New mothers make terrible friends. I include myself in this. I cannot be counted on: if I say I'm going to be somewhere at a certain time, that guarantee comes with fine print saying "assuming my child doesn't get sick or decide to adopt a radically new nap schedule just for today or have a massive nappy blow-out as I'm walking out the door." I am more than happy to listen to what's going on with someone else, but it's hard to find a time when that conversation won't be interrupted by a baby needing me and/or I'm not so exhausted that I'll have trouble keeping track of the conversation. And if you have a problem, I have nothing to offer but sympathy. I can't promise to do any favors to make your life easier. I can't even reliably promise to show up in an appointed place at an appointed time to listen to you tell me about your life.

So to start with, I'm in a poor position to make new friendships: I'm a complete flake, have been for months, and can only hope that some bright future day will see the return of my brain and some measure of control over my day. And then it turns out that everyone with whom I might make friends is in exactly the same boat. To quote one of my mom friends, "I just looked at my text history for the last two months and realized that my entire social life these days consists of making plans and then cancelling them."

We all like each other. In a perfect world, we'd love to spend time together. We're just so damn tired, and so damn many things can go pear-shaped in between when we make our well-intentioned plans and when it's actually time to show up at the park. And that makes it almost impossible to get to know anyone well enough to count on her when you really need a close friend.

The Apology

To those of you who've been googling Expat Survival Kit: I'm sorry. I left out one big thing in my previous posts about successful expatriating, and it really matters.

All that stuff you have to do, to live in your new place rather than just get by: you have to keep doing it. Even when it's frustrating and discouraging and just plain old hard. You can't just do the one thing once and it'll all work out; you have to allow for false starts and dead ends and just the fact that it takes time to get to know people well. And that sucks.

But I still have to believe that it's worth it. If I found out we were leaving Dublin next week, I don't think I'd be happy. I think I'd feel like I missed out. Because I haven't really lived in Dublin the last ten months; I've just resided here. And I'd like to live here. I'd like to have lived here, after we move away. I'd like to have stories about more than just the weather and that one Irish class I took. I'd like to have people to visit when we came back. I'd like to have made an impact in the community where I've spent so much time.

Last month I took my daughter for a very short trip back to London, where she was born. We had a wonderful time and it was depressing as hell, because it drew my attention to everything I try to forget I miss. All the way back through Dublin in the taxi, I just kept wanting to turn around and go home. And then we pulled up in front of our house and my daughter's face absolutely lit up with relief - because of course, as she knows and I've been denying, our house in Dublin is home.

I've done it before, and I know I can make Dublin into a home for myself, as well as my daughter. And you, my dear googler: I know you can, too.

Slán agus beannacht.

So, that's that. Next up in blogging, Book Reviews! or: How I Learned to Read Despite Having a Baby. Next month, I hope? Sometime this summer, anyway.

Expat Survival Kit II: The Toolbox

In my last post I gave a lot of general principles about moving to a new place, especially abroad, and how important it is to build a life when you get there rather than just sticking it out until you move on--but I gave very little information about how to do that. So, for my Inner New Expat, who read that post and wept, "but how? How do I make friends, and find the grocery store that carries Grape Nuts at less-than-extortionate prices, and figure out how to spend the hours I used to be at work?", I present:

The Expat Toolbox

The following are the actual items you will find in your Expat Survival Kit. Some of them are actual, and you can find/buy them. Some of them are metaphorical, and that's the hard part--you'll have to figure out how to create those for yourself.

(Note: most of these are geared toward the person who's not moving for his/her own job. If you move with a job in your own place, several of these issues--how to meet people; where to get advice; how to spend your days--will take care of themselves. I assume. I've only ever been in the position of moving sans day job.)

Before You Go:

I.  Guidebooks

You might as well start with the fun stuff. Pretend you're going on vacation, only this time you don't have to worry about "Three Day Itineraries" or "Top Ten Must Do"s because you'll be able to go see/do whatever cool stuff, whenever you want. Bask in this idea for a while.

II. Novels/Memoirs
While you're picking up your guidebooks, spend some time in the bookstore or library collecting books set in your destination. Maybe it's just me, but I find reading narrative gets me into the spirit of a place better than even the best guidebook.

Of course, it helps that both places I've prepared to move to have been literary powerhouses. (Though the downside of Dublin is that, historically, her writers have written mostly about how miserable it is there and how much they or their characters want to leave. Thank heaven for Roddy Doyle--and if anyone knows any books that present Dublin as a grand place to live, please pass 'em on.)

IIa. Movies
See II. Same principle, but even better, because you get to see the place!

Once You've Arrived:

III. Comfort Food from Home
Food is important. Eating doesn't just fuel the body; it gives the soul a sense of security. You'll have a lot of fun trying out local foods in your new home, but when you're at the end of your rope--and you will get there--you'll want that familiar-from-childhood comfort food you used to take for granted at home.

This one's tough, because you probably won't know what you'll miss most until you get there, can't find it, and miss it. This is where the next item comes in handy:

IV. A Visit from Your Friend from Home
This has to be scheduled very carefully--far enough from the date of your move that you can accommodate a guest, but close enough that the two of you will have the fun of exploring together. Not only is it incredibly reassuring to move knowing that in just a few weeks you will see a familiar face, but having a friend coming also means you have someone to bring you whatever you've realized you can't live without, and can't get in your new place.

V. Comfort Food from Your New Home
Your grocery store can be your friend as well as your biggest source of frustration. Take a break from trying to find the foods you're used to, and find the foods you're really going to miss when you move away from this new place. For me, it's sharp cheddar and tomato chutney on whole wheat; and ready-meal curries; and Turkish delight; and bite-sized chocolate rolls.

I once overheard a bunch of American college students getting very depressed in Sainsbury's because they couldn't find Hershey Kisses. I took pity and told them where to get them (the gourmet store near their dorm, of all places), but I still wish I'd told them the much, much more important secret: forget Hershey's anything and grab a selection of 1/2kg Cadbury bars. What's the point of your year abroad if you don't go back telling people, "oh, I got spoiled by real chocolate in Europe--American chocolate just tastes so bland in comparison"? (Even though calling Cadbury "real chocolate" is stretching the truth--it's still better than anything you can get at a grocery store in the States.)

VI. Club Memberships: if you're on a really good expat package, your/your spouse's company might even pay for these!

VIa. The Gym
Because exercise is good for you, and you suddenly have time for it. Also because endorphins can be your new best friends, until you meet some human best friends. And, not least, because finding your new favorite foods and building your new social life is going to involve consuming a lot more calories than you're used to.

VIb. The Expat Club
The Expat Wife is such an institution that, in certain cities, a whole infrastructure has sprung up to support her. You can start googling before you leave: "American Women's Club" [city]; "International Women's Club" [city]; "expat support" [city]. This is what your first friends in your new home are doing.

Back-to-school kits assembled by volunteers--including me!
--for students at a local primary school

This was probably my least-favorite part of moving to London. I felt like I kept having the same conversation over and over, and it just got less and less interesting. But! Going to club meetings was an excuse to wear nice clothes every couple of weeks (otherwise I could've just lived in whatever I wore to the gym in the morning); club meetings and activities gave those early, endless days some structure; other members of those groups had some great advice on living in London (it's thanks to the Kensington and Chelsea Women's Club that I could tell the college students where to get Hershey Kisses); and--oh yeah--I met some of my closest friends. So while I'm not looking forward to renewing the round of "so, have you figured out how to work your washing machine?" chat in Dublin, I know this is an important step in figuring out how to feel at home in a place, including building real relationships with wonderful people.

VIc. The Interest/Hobby/Service Group/Class
While going to museums and having long lunches with your new friends can be fun for a while, every one of my American-in-London friends eventually discovered that we needed to find a way to invest our time, instead of just spending it. Especially if you move for someone else's job, without one of your own, you will probably discover that one of the aspects of your old life that you most need to replicate in your new one, is a sense of purpose.

In some ways, this can be the hardest part of integrating into your new community. Expat clubs are, by definition, very welcoming to newcomers; it can take longer to prove yourself in an established group of locals. I sang with my choir for almost two years before I started to feel like one of the gang, and during rehearsals for my second Messiah performance last winter, I found out my fellow sopranos refer to me as "the American lady" (and my Canadian friend as "the other American lady").

Being "the American lady" instead of one of a largely American group makes me feel more at home in London. This has been increasingly true as I've joined more and more non-expat-focused activities: my volunteer group is largely American, but through them I spend a few hours a week working with local kids and teachers; in SCBWI, the important thing is that I write for teens. I'll always be "the American," but it's important to keep putting myself in situations where what I'm good at--or, in the case of the yoga and cooking classes I've taken, what I'm learning--is vastly more important than where I came from.

VII. Slack
This is probably the most important tool in your Expat Survival Kit. Wherever you're moving, under whatever circumstances, you're going to need as much of this as you can muster. The various situations in which giving yourself slack will come in handy could be their own (very long) post, but here are what I think are the two most important:

You're not from here. No matter how much advance prep you do, how much you embrace local culture, you will never have grown up in this place. No matter how many similarities you can find between the place you've left and the place you've arrived, there are going to be big, important differences, and they're going to trip you up and make you feel like an idiot. All you can do is keep giving yourself permission to just be an idiot when necessary. It sucks to learn the rules by breaking them, but the important thing is that you're learning the rules. Every dumb mistake you make gets you closer to the day when things that seem so weird now, become second nature.

Your local support system is weak. You're under an enormous amount of stress and the people who usually help you through stressful times are several time zones away. Many of your usual coping mechanisms aren't available in the new place, and you haven't figured out what will replace them yet. This is going to break through in some strange and potentially embarrassing ways. Forgive yourself for the occasional breakdown--no one you know can see you sobbing in the grocery store, anyway.

As the most important weapon in your arsenal, slack comes with a pretty major caveat: if time passes and you find yourself stuck in a helpless, hopeless, negative rut, get help. Cities with expat communities have therapists who specialize in emotional issues related to relocation: call one (or two, or a few). If you're in a place without that kind of expat support, try out a few local therapists, or see if you can set up phone/Skype sessions with someone in a more cosmopolitan location. If you're truly in the middle of nowhere, talk to the organization who sent you there about ways others have dealt with the situation. Don't just resign yourself to hating your situation: the whole point of all this is building a happy life despite the challenges of living abroad, not just enduring the various ways living abroad can suck.

Of course, this advice is all based on me and my one (so far) experience with moving internationally. I'm sure I've left out some piece of advice that's been a lifesaver for someone else. So, expat friends and relatives (and friends and relatives of friends and relatives), what have I missed? What's the most important advice you'd give to someone on the brink of an inter-cultural move?

The Expat Survival Kit

London icons, a block and a half from our flat.

And then the day finally comes. ... Although there have been moments of wondering if it will ever happen, given enough time and a genuine willingness to adapt, we will once again become part of the permanent community. ... We have a sense of intimacy, a feeling that our presence matters to this group.  We feel secure.  Time again feels present and permanent as we focus on the here and now rather than hoping for the future or constantly reminiscing about the past."

Third Culture Kids

David C. Pollock

Ruth E. Van Reken 

When I first read the above paragraph last weekend, I immediately commented to Gino, "and then it'll be time to move again."

I speak from experience.  The book I quoted is right: it's taken a lot of effort (and a lot of thinking it would never happen), but the last eighteen months or so London has truly felt like home.  I have meaningful work I love, and Gino and I have built a circle of smart, interesting, caring people as friends.  We have our favorite restaurants and things to do on a free weekend afternoon, and we've worn the "touristy must-do in London" list down to a nub.  We know the relative advantages of Sainsbury vs Waitrose and that you can buy pretty much anything you can ever imagine needing at Peter Jones.  We have become, as the book puts it in another context, competent.  We're good at London, good at being Americans in London.

And next week we'll be moving into corporate housing for a stretch, pending a move to Ireland later on this summer.

I shouldn't have read Third Culture Kids so hard on the heels of Chris Pavone's The Expats, which I downloaded to read on a driving holiday around France.  I've read a lot of books about expat life over  my life, and especially the past four years, and The Expats was the first one that had me nodding along: yep, been there, done that.

The novel made me want to create a survival pack for new expats, especially the new expats brought overseas by a spouse's career.  (The term of art is "trailing spouse."  If you think that alone isn't a blow to the ego of a competent, independent, previously self-supporting adult, you would be wrong.)  It would include a copy of The Expats, because one of the amazing things about moving to a new country is the sheer amount of free time you have to get through when you get there, and Pavone's novel could kill some of that very enjoyably, while giving you a glimpse of what you're in for.  The survival pack would include a bulk package of your favorite treats from back home, a sampler of delicacies native to your new home, and a list of the instructions I wanted to give the book's protagonist:  find some kind of work, even if it doesn't pay.  Take a class in something, anything, you're remotely interested in, or pick a hobby and find a way to pursue it in a group setting.  (And don't worry about being a cliche.  Cliches are often based in truth.)   To the extent that this is in your control, make a few friends who are native to your new home, or have lived there long-term.  Get together with the other parents at your kids' school and form a baby-sitting co-op so you can have the occasional non-parental evening, even when your husband's traveling.  Don't just get through the days--invest them in building some kind of life.  

I started to feel downright cocky about the move to Ireland: I've done this before.  I've got this changing-countries thing down.  This'll be a lark.

And then Third Culture Kids knocked me off my high horse.  No Expat Survival Kit would be complete without a copy of this book.  Seriously, even if you have no kids and no plan to have them--that just means you can skip the "schooling options" bit.  You should still read most of the book, which has tons to say about the process of relocating into a new culture, and repatriating back.  It was one of those books that told me all kinds of things I didn't realize I knew.

Holy cow.  The book stressed me out in advance.  It reminded me of everything I'd forgotten about exactly how hard it is to switch cities, let alone countries.  How you have to prove yourself all over again to a whole new group of people.  How you have to figure out where to get American products, because someday you will find yourself insanely homesick and only Betty Crocker Devil's Food Cake will make you feel better.  How you have to figure out where to get everything and how many things you didn't realize you can't live without until you decided to leave them behind.  How you have to find some way of passing the time while you slowly accumulate replacements for all the bits of your life you took for granted in the old place: Your work.  Your hobbies.  Your gym.  Your favorite restaurant that actually delivers.  Your friends.

At the same time, it made me feel validated.  All the emotions I experienced in the move to London, even the really embarrassingly immature and provincial ones, are chronicled and catalogued and pronounced perfectly normal.  And who doesn't love to have their more shameful moments--that time you burst into tears in the grocery store because you didn't recognize a single brand of peanut butter, say, or the week you bought something new every single day just so that somehow, something would be different at the end of the day than it was at the beginning--pronounced perfectly normal?

Whisky tasting at the Jameson Distillery.
Dublin will have its compensations.

But it did remind me that those steps I recommended above are necessary and the rewards of going through them really are great--but oh, they're hard.  And there's no getting away from it: the reason you know you need all that stuff, the friends and the gym and the work, is that you already had it, back where you came from.  And no one is going to hand any of it to you in this new place--you have to go out and get it all again.

Everyone I've talked to about this has noted the wave of homesickness that hits around the one-year mark in a new place.  The new glow has worn off and you're just integrated enough into the new community to know how integrated you're not.  When I was about at that point, I had tea with a dear friend who was about a year ahead of me on the expat cycle, and I admitted that I was tempted to give up on making a life and just go into endurance mode until someone told me it was time to leave London.  Since someone was going to tell me to go away eventually, what was the point of making London into somewhere I wanted to live?

My friend listened patiently, and pointed out: "if you're as heartbroken to leave London as you were to leave New York, that's not necessarily a bad thing."  And surprise surprise, she was right.  The grief at leaving London, the conviction that Dublin can't possibly be as good... I wouldn't be feeling any of that if I hadn't done a pretty damn good job of making myself at home here.  And four years ago, I didn't think that was possible, either.

About halfway through The Expats, Pavone describes guests at a Christmas party in Luxembourg:

This party was dominated by the sizable contingent who'd circled around themselves as Americans, exclusionary, flag-pin wearing.  Behaving as if they hadn't chosen to live in Europe, but had been moved against their wills, and were putting up a brave resistance.  Freedom fighters.

I've definitely met those people, and as I said, I understand the temptation.  Third Culture Kids notes that one response to moving into a new culture, recognizing that you'll always be an outsider, is to broadcast your difference and cling even more closely to the culture you know and understand.  When I first moved to London, I met several women who played a lot of bridge and went on a lot of day trips and, from the way they talked about living here, generally just tried  to endure the time before they could go home and back to real life.

Having had periods of living that way, and periods of throwing myself at London until it let me in, I can tell you: in the long run it's a lot easier to make yourself at home in the new place, than to grit your teeth and endure being away from home for years at a time.

And it's so totally worth it.  It's not exactly easy to rebuild your life every few years, and it really sucks to say good-bye to what you've built.  But you have to keep reminding yourself: this is your life.  These two or three or ten or twenty years you're spending abroad, you don't ever get these back.  Home is a long way away, in both time and space. Since you have to be here, you might as well put in the effort through the initial rebuilding process (and deal with the eventual, inevitable grief).  Then you get at least a couple years where things are easy again, and you get to go home with years' worth of amazing memories and stories and friends from all over the world.

My Imaginary Boyfriends

Calvin O'Keefe.  Jeff Greene.  Joe Willard.  Stan Crandall.

Scholastic's Blog has me thinking about my first loves.

Joe Willard was the responsible,
mature man in Deep Valley.

Even without the bibliophilic inspiration, of course my first crushes were from books.  Looking back on it, I'm surprised I can't come up with a longer list.  Whatever was drawing me into all those hours of reading must have been the plots or the themes or the settings or something, 'cause it wasn't the characters.

Except for some of them.

When I read them as a kid, all of the guys in my favorite books were wise beyond their years, masters of any situation--and this was pretty much what I thought guys must be like in general.  So, in jr high or high school, if a guy I liked didn't ask me out (despite the rumor mill's assurance that he wanted to), I had no idea that he might be shy or scared of rejection or waiting for me to pick up on some of his more obvious hints and give him a smidgen of encouragement.  No, if a guy I liked wasn't asking me out, it must be because he wasn't interested.

Jeff Greene woo'd Dicey
--and me--with American
roots music.

That must have been hella wishful thinking on my part.  'Cause I've read all those books as many times as an adult as I did as a kid--which is a lot--and what I love about the books now is how none of the characters are perfect. The guys in the stories are excellent, yes, but excellent teenage boys, not paragons of maturity and wisdom.

Jeff, the boy in love with Dicey in one of my favorite books ever, is comfortable around Dicey's family and always says the right thing--except that he doesn't; he's awkward and unsure of himself and the only reason their friendship goes anywhere is because Dicey occasionally gets out of her own head enough to meet him halfway.  Joe Willard, who ends up married to my imaginary best friend Betsy Ray, is handsome and talented--but he's prickly and officious and gets offended at the drop of a hat, which is why it takes him and Betsy five books to actually get together and stay together.

Or take Stan Crandall, the love interest in the first romance novel I ever read.  The whole point of Stan Crandall is for Jane Purdy to figure out that despite his height and smarts and charm, he's not a Lord of Creation (to borrow Louisa May Alcott's turn of irony)--he's a kid, like her, and one of the big things they have in common is an overabundance of self-consciousness.

Which brings us back around to Calvin O'Keefe.  (And Josiah Davidson.  And Adam Eddington, be still my heart, Adam Eddington.  And, oh, Queron Renier.  And almost--almost--every other young man ever thought up by Madeleine L'Engle.)

Adam Eddington somehow managed
to be the boy next door and
unattainable all at once, while
Zachary Gray brings out the amateur
shrink in all of us.

Even on re-reading as an adult, Calvin is as close to perfect as a human can conceive.  He's popular but doesn't let it go to his head.  He's completely sure of himself, to the point of being able to tell Meg "what dreamboat eyes" she has, within hours of their first meeting.  He's come to grips with his dysfunctional family at a ridiculously young age.  And while the biographical details of each differ, L'Engle's heros are the only guys from my favorite books that match my youthful idealization.

Which is why, as an adult, my favorite L'Engle Guy is Zachary Gray, who never made my list of crushworthy characters.  Zachary is, at least in the books I've read the most, a cautionary tale about the tendency to get into relationships with people who need a lot more care than a teenager can hope to give.  His function is generally to be the bad-boy temptation and get rejected--for excellent reasons--by the protagonist, and the fact that he's smart, rich, sensitive, and handsome, yet bad for a girl, makes him among the most complex male characters in the L'Engle canon.

Paying it forward: who were your teenage literary crushes?  If you've re-read those books lately, how do they hold up to your memories?

Some people just don't like to cook, okay?

Somehow, no-nonsense cooking and eating — roasting a chicken, making a grilled cheese sandwich, scrambling an egg, tossing a salad — must become popular again, and valued not just by hipsters in Brooklyn or locavores in Berkeley. --Mark Bittman, in today's NYTimes

Ugh.  Here we go again.


Don't get me wrong: I love to cook.  It is a matter of great pride with me that I can come up with a homemade, three-course dinner for six with three hours' notice, one trip to the grocery store, and not more than a cursory glance into one of my more well-worn cookbooks.  This photo is from a never-written post about my organic fruit & veg delivery service, and how pleasant it was to make a dinner of pasta and salad using only what I had available.  I consider sitting with a stack of cookbooks and planning a menu or several to be a very enjoyable way to spend an afternoon.

But even I, someone who works part-time, enjoys cooking, and loves feeding people, do not want to cook every night.  Cooking turns into a chore very quickly when you're doing it out of necessity rather than joy.  And even when carefully planned to minimize mess, cooking leads to dirty pots and pans and knives and gadgets--none of which go in the dishwasher--and another 30-45 minutes in the kitchen, after the fun part's over.

Cooking also leads to leftover ingredients.  The blog post about the pasta never got written, because I cancelled the delivery service.  If there's one thing more guilt-inducing than feeling you don't cook enough, it's throwing away organic beets that rotted before you got around to reading the instructions for how to prepare them.  But even if you're buying for a meal you know you're going to make, you're pretty much guaranteed to end up, later, wondering what to do with those other four scallions or that last quarter-cup of coconut milk.  Every now and then I'll make a salad to keep in the fridge, but even buying one head of lettuce and one carrot and one pepper and so on, it usually goes bad before I can finish it.

If I only sometimes find myself able to rise above these obstacles to make a home-cooked dinner, what chance does someone have, who has more responsibilities than I do and doesn't like to cook in the first place?

The smart campaign is not to get McDonald’s to serve better food but to get people to see cooking as a joy rather than a burden, or at least as part of a normal life.

Why, Mr. Bittman?  Why do we all have to cook (and, ahem, clean) every night?  Why can't we just have convenient, healthy, prepared food, so people don't have to chose between convenience and health?

I know this can be done, because it's my daily reality.  I haven't cooked unless I wanted to for three years, because I can pick up a healthy dinner from the grocery store on the way home from the Tube station.  Sometimes it's fish cakes and steamed vegetables; sometimes it's microwaveable Indian or Italian or Chinese food; sometimes it's vegetable soup and whole-wheat rolls.  (Every now and then it's pizza and a bottle of wine.)  There are low-sodium and low-saturated fat and low-calorie options available.  I've read the ingredient lists, and they're the same as the ingredient lists in my recipe books:  no preservatives, no fake food.  (You can tell, because they expire after 3 days in the fridge, or about a month in the freezer.)

Now, before you all yell at me: I know this means a lot more paper and plastic is coming out of my house than if I were cooking from fresh ingredients.  Most of it gets recycled.  In any case, waste is an engineering problem, not a physics problem.  Ditto cost, as I do suspect that eating this way is more expensive than cooking--though not if you believe that time is money.

If you read the op-ed, Mark Bittman says a lot of bad things about processed food, and they're all true.  But none of them have to be.  It's the current method of processing food in America that's at issue, not the definition of processing--which does, after all, include "cooking".

The 1998 tobacco settlement limited cigarette marketing and forced manufacturers to finance anti-smoking campaigns — a negotiated change that led to an environmental one that in turn led to a cultural one, after which kids said to their parents, “I wish you didn’t smoke.” Smoking had to be converted from a cool habit into one practiced by pariahs.

But that's the thing, Mr. Bittman: people had to be convinced to stop smoking, or better yet, not start.  They didn't have to be convinced to: spend time planning, drive 10-20 minutes out of their way, learn a new skill, spend 15-60 minutes a night performing that skill, and then clean up after it.  Not starting to do something is generally a lot easier than starting to do it.

Look, I spent a lot of time a few years ago kicking myself for not cooking.  I was pretty much living on take-out while I worked full time and went to graduate school.  On my few evenings home, I popped a WeightWatchers meal into the microwave rather than cook up something from the Moosewood book.  I spent weekends writing, doing housework, and--gasp--relaxing with my fiance, when I should have been making batches of the week ahead's meals.  I was sure this was a moral failing of the first order.

Finally, Christmastime came, and I re-read A Christmas Carol, as I do every year.  I came across the line, Scrooge took his usual melancholy meal in his usual melancholy tavern.  That sent me to thinking about other meals in other books: the bachelor in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter arranging to have his lunch and dinner with the diner nearest his boarding house; the many meals botched by Betsy Ray Willard while Joe is at work (and the fact that one reason Betsy can't cook is that her family's always had a housekeeper to do it); Jo's failure to make a nice lunch on Hannah's day off.  It dawned on me: expecting people to come home from work and cook dinner is a pretty short-lived phenomenon, historically.  For most of the history of western civilization, preparing daily meals has been accepted as a perfectly acceptable job to pay someone else to do.

I'm not sure why that has changed.  The world is full of personal tasks that are as perfectly okay to outsource as they are to perform.  I can't imagine anyone sane claiming that everyone, regardless of circumstances, must compost their own waste rather than leave it out for the garbage collectors to deal with for them.  I never worried, in the days when I sent out my sheets and towels rather than spend hours in the laundromat trying to get them dry, that I was somehow letting myself down by not doing every stitch of my own laundry.  Nobody writes op-eds about how important it is that busy people clean their own house instead of hiring cleaners (provided those cleaners are fairly paid).  I don't see any reason why cooking should be any different.

When it comes to food prep, why not give people a chance to do what they're already doing, but differently?  What is it about the chore of cooking that makes some people say, "you must do this for yourself"--against all available evidence?

There's no reason why eating healthfully shouldn't be as easy as eating unhealthfully.  People of America: you don't need to cook more, you just need better non-cooking options.

Tree, Meet Chainsaw.

I've been meaning to write this post for weeks, ever since the Oxford Literary Festival way back at the beginning of April. I have a really good excuse for not doing it: I've been too busy working on putting it all into practice!

Marking up this manuscript was the most writing fun I've had in years.

Retyping the whole thing is running a very close second,
and may edge out the marking-up process any day now.

I really, really hate writing first drafts. So it's not at all surprising that writing this one took two years. I broke every conventional-wisdom writing rule in the process, too. I didn't write fast (obviously). I frequently stopped forward progress through the draft to go back and make major changes earlier in the novel. I didn't get critique at any point in the first-draft writing process. At one point I decided the WIP was really two books, not one, and having re-organized things to account for that, I spent a good three months doing absolutely anything I could think of (including massively long blog posts on Egypt and Glee) to keep from having to write the ending of Book 1. I am incredibly proud of the result, which if I do say so myself, is one of the most disjointed, self-indulgent 95,000-word monstrosities I've ever produced.

The process of turning it into a coherent, teen-friendly, 75,000-word (I hope) novel began with the Oxford Literary Festival, which for me opened at 10:00 on a Saturday in early April with a panel of "Creative Writing Fellows at Oxford Brookes University on Voice," featuring Patience Agbabi, Kate Clanchy, and Philip Pullman.

You had to feel sorry for Patience Agbabi and Kate Clanchy, simply for the fact that they had to be at the same book-signing table with Philip Pullman while not actually being Philip Pullman. (I ended up buying Kate Clancy's novel in part because I was standing right next to her while waiting to have Four Tales signed for my nephew. Only in part, though--I'd really liked what she had to say on the panel, and I'm looking forward to reading the book.) But on the panel, they all three gave evidence of being excellent teachers of the craft of writing--which is really, as they all made clear, the craft of re-writing. As Kate Clanchy put it, "You re-write to get back to what you meant."

In 10 years of hearing him speak and reading his essays, I've come to accept that Philip Pullman and I differ about as much as is possible in our writing processes. He is outspokenly anti-outline; I wouldn't write more than a first scene without one. He finds writing to music gets in the way of his own sense of the rhythm and music in his writing. I have trouble concentrating without background music, which I put on to distract the non-helpful, interfering voices in my head.

On this particular panel, however, Pullman came up with one of the best metaphors for writing and re-writing I've ever encountered: "the process of writing is like growing a tree. Re-writing is carpentry: cutting down the tree and building something out of it." He went on to compare the parts of a WIP that aren't working as "dead wood," and give the writer permission to read back in the manuscript to the last place where it felt alive, cut away the dead wood, and work from there.

Can I just take a minute here and talk about how freakin' liberating it is to go through your manuscript and draw huge black Xs over entire pages? Through entire chapters, even? No struggling to give the scene a purpose; no tearing my hair out trying to make something work that doesn't. Just cut it away and go from there.

(I highly recommend the Oxford Literary Festival as a day out, by the way. About half of the main tent was taken up by a pop-up Blackwell's Books store, but the rest of the retail space was given over to liquor companies. A nice young lady holding samples of scotch greeted the crowd exiting the panel for the Roald Dahl Funny Prize, which sent us all into fits of even more hysterical laughter than we were already in, and a lovely person from Hendrick's Gin offered bite-sized gin & tonics to those of us waiting in line to have books signed by Louise Rennison and Michael Rosen. It did make it a little hard to stay awake for the Simon Winchester lecture, but it was totally worth it. Sadly, it did not lower my inhibitions enough to let me tell Michael Rosen that I kind of want to be him when I grow up and in the meantime could I please get a picture taken with him.)

Anyway. Back to the topic at hand. I've made one other huge discovery in the re-writing process for this book: instead of going back through an existing draft and making the changes in my notes, I'm re-typing the whole thing, start-to-finish. This is proving to have so many advantages over my earlier method that I can't believe I ever did it any other way. It seems to me, now, that making changes to an existing manuscript is rather like patching a hole in a piece of clothing; there's no way to make the new fabric match precisely, or hide the stitching. Re-typing, on the other hand, feels like using some existing fabric, and some new, to make something entirely different, and better. I'm so pleased with it I'm hoping against hope that this turns out to be a new Universal Writing Truth--universal for me, anyway--and not something that only works for this one draft of this one novel.

After a long, often-excruciating first-draft process, it's so nice to have this part be fun. I had this horrible worry, all the way through the first draft, that I was going to end up with something so unwieldy that I'd never be able to make it into anything. For two years I had to keep shouting down and drowning out the critical internal editor rolling her eyes and muttering, "oh, this is such crap, you are so bad at this." Now I can finally let the inner editor loose, and force her to help me build, instead of tearing everything down.