Boys and Girls Like You and Me

Sprung

The Storm

We had a hurricane a couple months ago—you might have heard about it.  Turned out to be a bit of a non-event, this hurricane.  At least in New York.  But the day-or-so leading up to it?  Total shit-storm. 

Originally, I had plans to spend Hurricane Night with friends in Brooklyn, but as the hullabaloo about taped windows and bottled water and “go bags” grew in intensity, my friends began to vacillate:  Maybe we should all stay put.  Maybe we should hunker down.  The difference between my friends and me, however, was that they were all hunkering down with someone else, whilst I was hunkering alone. 

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Win a Copy of Boys and Girls Like You and Me →

In honor of our Back to School Theme Reading next Thursday at Housing Works Bookstore, mi amiga* Alison Espach is having a contest over on her very new, very fine blog.  

To enter, write twenty-five words or less about your elementary school crush.  The winner gets a signed copy of my story collection and a $25.00 gift certificate to Housing Works, which, by the by, is my favorite bookstore in New York (they throw a gin mingle every year—don’t even get me started on that gin mingle).  

So check it out.  As a bonus, you can see an awkward photo of me from the Plaid and Lace Years.

*I read her novel, then stalked her until she became my friend.  

“This Book Made Me Want to Die” and Other Thoughts From Readers

*I posted this essay on my website a couple years ago.  It was recently published (with a different title) in The Writer Magazine, and I’ve been asked by a reader to repost it here.  Of course I said, “Of course!” because why write something new when you can get attention for something you wrote a long time ago?  (Don’t answer that.)  Anyway, here it is, again:

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Summer

Moon Farm

As summer comes to a close, I feel the need to announce publicly, “I MADE IT THROUGH WITHOUT AN AIR CONDITIONER!” To my friends who spent the last few months listening to me incessantly bitch about how not having an air conditioner was making me both miserable and insane, I would like to say 1) Thank you; and 2) Sorry. I realize how annoying it is when someone gripes about a problem with an easy solution—like hearing a smoker complain of a nagging cough.  Regardless, summer is over.  There shall be no further mention of my climate control issues.  At least, not for another nine months or so. 

I’ve never been a huge fan of summer.  I don’t really care for hiking or camping or interacting with nature.  I like the part where you get to drink beer outside, but when the city smells like urine and rotting garbage, the experience loses a bit of its luster. 

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On the Creative Process

Goodwillie:  We should write this screenplay now if we're going to write it. I have enthusiasm right now.
Me:  And we know how fleeting that can be.
Goodwillie:  I'm very good at sustaining enthusiasm. I've written two books, you know.
Me:  Enthusiasm has nothing to do with finishing a book. You start a book on enthusiasm. You finish a book--
Goodwillie:  On meds.

Boys and Girls Like Him and Her

“Maybe,” David said a few days ago, “we should keep the blog going.”

“But the tour’s over,” I said.

At least, it probably is.  We’ve had some invitations to go south, and though we have no funding for a southern leg of our tour, we’re maybe-kind-of thinking about doing it anyway.  The tour was fun, after all.  Much more fun than writing.  

Last week, we read at BookCourt.  Because it was our ten thousandth event together, we thought we’d try something different and read from each other’s books instead of reading from our own.  This had mixed results.  David read from the title story of my collection, though he changed the narrator from a woman to a man, something I did not know he was going to do until he announced it into the microphone.  In addition to changing the gender of the narrator, he changed a few other details too. 

“Why did you do that?” I asked when he was finished, and he shrugged.

“Just to fuck with you.”

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The Inglorious End

We are now back in New York, tired and bruised, but home.  If our stint in San Francisco hadn’t taken most of the starch out of us, the last few nights in LA certainly did the trick.  Our second-to-last reading was in Manhattan Beach, hosted by friends of David, who, in addition to serving up a more impressive spread of food than I eat on most high holidays, provided one of the most generous and enthusiastic audiences I’ve ever read for.  And you really can’t beat a literary event where you arrive to find a model making bruschetta in high heels and an apron.  Post-reading, she took us out on the town (sans apron) and we drank in a kitschy bar on the beach, where, at some point, it was decided that the only way to end the night was by doing a round of tequila shots and swimming in the ocean.

You know what’s awkward?  When someone says, “Let’s run naked into the ocean!” and you think this means naked-naked while everyone else seems to understand that it means mostly naked.  I realized my mistake about three beats too late, and while everyone else was taking their clothes off, I was hurrying to put mine back on, a decision I came to regret, since I only had one bra with me, and it would, for the rest of the trip, smell like the ocean, only not in a beachy-coconut kind of way, but in a rotting-seaweed way.  Which was awesome, since our final reading was at Soho House in West Hollywood, and I cannot imagine a more appropriate venue for me to show up wearing a wrinkled dress and smelling like dead fish.  

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On Headlining

Me:  You realize that you read last at every single event except one, right?
Goodwillie:  Well, if you had known more than one person in any audience, things would have been different. In Portland, you knew two people. So you got to read last.
Me:  I told you that I don't know anyone in LA.
Goodwillie:  How is that even possible? LA is the second-largest city in the US. It's like you just dropped onto the planet at the age of--how old are you?
Me:  Thirty-three.
Goodwillie:  I don't understand how you could be alive for thirty-three years and not know a single person in all of LA. Not even a casual acquaintance. At least it's not like you grew up in the West. Except, oh right, you did.

On Fame

Me:  We're in The New Yorker this morning!
Goodwillie:  (yawning) Figures that it would take me to get you into The New Yorker.

6MEN and a Little Lady

Somewhere between San Simeon and Los Angeles, we realized we had maybe stolen our rental car.  Perhaps it was the thrill of seeing the Hearst Castle that caused us to completely forget that we were supposed to either return the car or call Enterprise and extend our usage of it.  Or maybe thoughts of the car had been overshadowed by the fact that we had come to the end of our time in San Francisco without a) figuring out where we were going to stay once we got to LA, or b) booking plane tickets home.  Regardless, we’d dropped the proverbial ball and now, we feared, were going to be proverbially screwed. 

The car, dubbed “The 6MEN” because of its license plate number (6MEN331), was a far cry from the sleek and saucy convertible of David’s dreams, but it was one size larger than the car we’d originally reserved, and we’d managed—by means still not entirely understood by me—to rent it for $8.00 a day.  All I know is that when we picked the 6MEN up in Oakland, the man behind the desk wrote down one number, and when David said something to the young woman in the parking lot about that number being a little high, she laughed like he had told her something tremendously witty, then crossed out the first number and wrote a second, significantly smaller, number beside it.  

“How did you do that?” I asked as we pulled out of the lot, and David shrugged.

“Maybe if you stopped dressing like you still live in Utah,” he said, “the guy inside would have knocked the price a little too.”

“First of all,” I told him, “I have never lived in Utah.  And second of all, I chill very easily.” 

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"I like how you get so into defending ‘all womankind.’ Until you start bitching about every chick you know."

— David Goodwillie, New York Times Notable Author

Santa Monica Pier