The Righteous Feeling of Being Wronged - BIG LITTLE LIES

Ignoring the fact that every book these days seems to have the words "Lies/Liars" or "Girl" in the title, Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty was a super fun read. I'd never read anything by her before, but walking around with the book, I was shocked by how many friends said, "Oh, I read every single thing she writes." So, clearly, I'm late to the game.

One of the things Moriarty does so well - besides humor (and sentiment without being sentimental) - is cut to the chase of certain, fundamental human behaviors that feel familiar, even if you've never been in the exact position as her characters.

For example:

"He turned off the bathroom light. They both went to opposite sides of the bed, snapped on their bedside lamps and pulled back the cover in a smooth, practiced, synchronized move that proved, depending on Madeline's mood, that they either had the perfect marriage or that they were stuck in a middle-class suburban rut and they needed to sell the house and go traveling around India."

...and kinda just perfectly captures the pendulum swing that the mind is capable of depending on the vagaries of mood. So, yeah, I'll steal that.

And this one:

"It was over now. There would be no further recriminations about the party. In fact, the very opposite. He'd be tender and solicitous. For the next few days up until he left for his trip, no woman would be more cherished than Celeste. Part of her would enjoy it: the tremulous, teary, righteous feeling of being wronged."

The Righteous Feeling of Being Wronged. Yes, who hasn't milked that feeling for all it's worth at some point or another?! So, I'll take that one, too.

Restraint - WE WERE LIARS

Thinking about my next book project, and the first ideas that come to me are not about plot, but about atmosphere. A book that is pared down. A book that makes inferences rather than hits you upside the head with information. A book that is closer to abstract painting than photorealism.

Something about We Were Liars by E. Lockhart captures this. There is an economy of language. Short sentences. Concise paragraphs.

"Next day Mirren and I take the small motorboat to Edgartown without permission.
The boys don't want to come. They are going kayaking.
I drive and Mirren trails her hand in the wake.
Mirren isn't wearing much: a daisy-print bikini top and a denim miniskirt."

And it goes on like this. Sentences that say more than they say. And that's important in order for the book to pull off its final reveal.

I'm hoping to channel just a bit of that quiet, confident sense of language that trusts the reader just enough so that the reader rises to the occasion.

Into the Shuffle - THE PERFORMANCE

As my first novel, No Winter Angel, comes to a close, there is one outstanding debt that I have not written about here--in part, because I read it so long ago, but it has stayed with me, probably informing lots of things I don't even realize.

It's a short story by Arthur Miller called "The Performance," and actually, I discovered it by way of a song that I heard in 2003 by Erin Mckeown, entitled "An Innocent Fiction." She'd read Miller's story and wrote this beautiful homage to it.

"The Performance" is about a Jewish tap dancer from the United States who travels to Europe in the 1930s and winds up dancing in a private show for Hitler, who subsequently falls in love with the performance without realizing that the performer is Jewish. Just the idea itself is so powerful. And I was--and continue to be--struck by the "breathtaking idea of a government" taking interest in a dance. And how intoxicating that must feel to the dancer, even if the government is repugnant and vile.

I had to explore the complex way this must play out in the artist's mind. When you read the dance scene in No Winter Angel, this is the image I want to convey. The terror and the power and the intoxication that make any simple moral judgment suspect.

And this image of Hitler, almost childlike in his awe and carnal in his enthusiasm, stays with me: "The troupe went into the stomp, shoes drumming the stage floor, and Hitler seemed transfixed now, swept up in the booming rhythms, both clenched fists pressing down on the tabletop, his neck stretched taut, his mouth slightly agape. 'I thought we were looking at an orgasm,' Harold said." Indeed!