What would make the jokes really hilarious is that Seth would know that in fact it was true—that I had seen his dick. That I and a group of other women—maybe a few guys in there too—had managed to convince him one to strip down—for his first feature role, for a role in the kind of film that earns award nominations, for the job of awards-show host, maybe for all three, and that we had seen his trajectory from bush to trim to wax, and that we knew that his dick was in fact exceptionally small. Nonetheless we had cajoled and encouraged and assured him that no, his dick did not look too small but yes, that prosthetic really was the way to go, and that no one would ever know (this based on the vehement claims of a male friend that Mark Walberg had used a prosthetic in Boogie Nights). And it was so important to the project, and he was so great. Wiggle it a little just like that. Oh fabulous. Thank you. Cut.

Now, at this point in the mental movie I’m playing for myself on my sunny walk to work, I’m thinking, “That’s not even funny. Small dick jokes. Jesus. Just lame to mock bodies. Some people really have small dicks, and that must suck in this culture, even if it doesn’t level the playing field of the patriarchy.” Seriously, I thought this. I gave a moment’s consideration to those who might have smaller than average penises, and how my fantasy stand-up routine would make them feel, and about how it fit into the larger culture. But somehow the idea of the unfunny meanness of my fantasy attack fueled me today, and in my mental movie I start going off the script—which up until now has been approved by the Academy— and instead of closing I keep going on and on about Seth MacFarlane’s small dick. In reality, I’ve used up all the small dick jokes I have at my disposal, so the jokes in my mental movie are playing in that Peanut’s adult-speak voice, like “mwwa mwwa mwwa mwwa mwa.” They are cuttingly mean and true and therefore funny despite the exhausted subject matter, or perhaps because of it, or because Seth McFarland’s success makes us all feel a little let down by ourselves. The producers of the show start playing that Jaws music to shut me up, but it can barely be heard above the crowd’s uproarious laughter, some of which is genuine and in celebration of a break-down of the farce and some fueled by fear and shock. Meanwhile, the stage directions have called for Seth to get changed out of his tux into some sort of costume that features maybe a breast plate and a lamé jock-strap contraption, some feathers on his shoes, and he’s standing in the wings in this get-up, ready for his cue. He was supposed to come on stage 72 seconds ago. He has a smile pasted on his now-sweating face, and the Jaws music and cruel laughter are still playing, and then one of the escorts—I noticed last night that they were coed for a change, but in my movie it was a statuesque, young, faux-tanned, faux-blonde woman in a sweeping gown— walks him out to the podium. And everyone would write about it in the morning. The dress I wore, and how well. What luxury corporation made it. How much skin I was showing and whether I’d lost that weight I’d bravely put on for my last role.

Sari’s responses appear on her blog Muttering. Next up will be Laura Bogart, whose fierce nonfiction I have admired on The Nervous Breakdown, Salon, The Rumpus, and elsewhere and whose fiction I look forward to reading. And Eiren Caffall and I have tagged each other. We’re all answering the same set of questions.

1. What is your working title of your book (or story)?

The first page of my draft consists of a list of potential titles. Right now I’m leaning towards Telling, or In the Telling.

2. Where did the idea come from for the book?

Soon after becoming a parent, my mind and body still reeling from that enormity, I learned that an extended family member was in prison for a crime he committed against a child. This news brought some of my earliest and most distinct memories into new focus, and my brain started to churn.

3. What genre does your book fall under?

Memoir.

4. Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Gotta pass on this question. I’m not even good at this game with fiction, and my mind is absolutely blank when the character I’d be casting for is me.

5. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

It’s about the times I’ve told people that I was sexually assaulted as a child, which also becomes a story about family lineage and contemporary parenting.

6. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

There’s a third way: publication by one of the many good indie presses, which often consider unagented manuscripts but give an author some institutional support. That’s how I published my novel, CURRENCY, and the experience was pretty great. I would consider going that route again. But first I suppose I will try to find an agent.

7. How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

I’m still working on it, but the end is in sight. I’m thinking I will have spent about 2 to 3 years on the first draft, or first and a half draft, since on a sentence level I revise a lot as I go. I have found my stride, now, but I have a full-time job and two kids, and blocks of time are hard to find.

8. What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

The book I find myself turning to most often for guidance and inspiration is Fierce Attachments, by Vivian Gornick. I’ve also looked closely at The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch, Half a Life by Darin  Strauss, The  Adderall Diaries by Stephen Elliot, and The Rules of Inheritance by Claire Bidwell Smith. These books all have a raw urgency and searching quality to them that I don’t see in most memoirs. They seem very alive to me in a way I hope my book becomes. I’m especially interested  in works where there’s a conversation taking place between a then and a now. Where the story still seems somewhat open and unfolding.

9. Who or what inspired you to write this book?

I don’t know if I’m inspired so much as compelled. I feel a need to make sense of various currents in my life in the best way I know how, which is through writing. And I also feel an urgency about shedding some light on the issue of child sex assault, which both exists in the shadows and in the form of  stock cultural images that don’t always fit the reality experienced by many of us.

10. What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

There are some good sex scenes as well as a couple bad ones. (The fact that sex is the first thing that comes to mind when I look at that question is itself a topic explored in the book.) I’m also feeling good about this book as a piece of writing, as a work of literature. However terrified I feel about this exposing personal nonfiction seeing the light of day, I sense I’m on to something, and I’m not letting go.

The Beautiful Anthology! I’m so pleased to be in this velvety book, exploring one of life’s hot topics alongside writers such as Gina Frangello, Melissa Febos, Greg Olear, Jessica Anya Blau, M. J. Fievre, Angela Tung, and more more more.  Check out the trailer, with music by Rich Ferguson.

And buy the book! It’s the only place my essay will live.

I wrote about being struck dumb by encountering a breathtakingly beautiful Thai boy, and at a time when I was de-emphasizing everything feminine about my own appearance. The man I mention in the essay is not the prototype for Piv, the main character in Currency, but the brief relationship I had with him definitely started me thinking about the collision of tourists and tour guides and how cultural position impacts gender roles. Plus, some of the hot bits are set in a hillside opium den. Or, well, it was more like an opium hut, actually, with mounds of garlic to lounge on instead of embroidered silk pillows, but still.

I will admit that before I wrote this essay, I thought that I was completely done with the subject of Thailand. Surely after a novel and promotion for it, and with my last visit there more than ten years in the past, I should move on. But I ended up really getting into telling this real-life story. Okay, I thought after I submitted it. So NOW I’m done.

Except, hmmmm. Speaking of opium dens. Last week I was riveted by a Talk of the Town in The New Yorker about a writer named Steven Martin, a long-time Bangkok hand who was a first a scholar of opium culture and who then became an addict. He still collects the paraphernalia.  He has a memoir coming out this week that I can’t wait to get my hands on–Opium Fiend. Seems like it could also be the germ for some fun fiction.  Never say never.

Its merits have been detailed elsewhere, and will deservedly continue to be. One of the things that resonates closest to home for me is just the fact of a woman’s solo journey. It occurs to me—without immediately being able to trot out much support—that it’s becoming an archetype, this vision questy sort of trek undertaken by a woman in her twenties, the punishment and purification of the trail or the road met outside of a vehicle, the necessity of the solitude and the way gender informs, deconstructs, falls away in its face. Maybe it just seems like an archetype because I’m reading this one book now and have read maybe a couple solo-women-traveler anthologies and have lived a version of it,  talked to other women who have. It’s ready to be an archetype. We need it.

I’ve wrestled with the large role the journeys I took in my twenties continue to play in my writing and in my imagination, in my sense of myself. At times I’ve felt sheepish about it. ‘This is the last time I’m going to write about Southeast Asia,’ I told myself about the essay that’s going to appear in The Beautiful Anthology. Shouldn’t I have other grand themes by now? And I do, to some degree. But to another degree, I don’t, actually. The hitchhiking and backpacking remain cornerstones, bedrocks of my identity. Even motherhood—the painful antithesis to solo voyaging, it would seem, and the start of new story lines—I’ve seen differently because of the solo-journey lens.

I’m writing about the hitchhiking trip in the memoir I’m working on right now. I’m writing about stuff even further back, stuff I’ve often told myself to let go of. Why keep fingering it, picking at it? I sometimes fear I’m destroying it by doing so,  creating a false construct in its place. But I’m taking from WILD something that I need, which is permission to continue to examine crucial moments and milestones, to go back to them repeatedly, to allow their importance to remain and illuminate even as my life rolls on. What happens when we’re young—young children, young in our sense of ourselves as adults—is important.

I think at times I’ve been too ready to devalue youth, especially my own female youth, which is something I deride others for doing. I can view the years separating me from youth as a divorce, where one stage can no longer lay claim to what’s found in another. But we exist at once. That’s what I more often feel lately. It’s one of the nice things about getting older, how much we can contain.

Women can do this, take on mythic journeys and be forever changed, and there is a literature of it. There’s coming to be one. WILD. So good.

I was so excited and nervous about talking to her. Yes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Edith Wharton, Graham Greene, Nadine Gordimer, Mary Gaitskill, Alice Munro—but Lisa Carver meant , well, not more to me, but . . .  She was my friend in my mind. Or she was who I wanted to be my friend. She’s exactly my age, but I thought she of her as the cool older girl. I didn’t have celebrity crushes. No Madonna or Exene or whoever. I watched and longed for and studied the women at the bar with the shorn hair, the purple hair, the double nose ring; the outlandish, off-hand style and impeccable connections; the ones who knew the bartender, the band, everything, everyone. Most of these crushes were had when I was still a teenager, or close to it. And I got to know most of the women, eventually. And then usually the bubble burst. Not necessarily from disillusionment; sometimes it burst into friendship—we’re all just people. But Lisa Carver. There’s something about her sentences, so casual yet so carefully constructed, and the way they seem to loop to her brain and her loins and her energy. And then to talk to her about newly exposed childhood memories of the most profound assault and a diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder in the context of the world’s skepticism about such things, and in the context of my own wrestling with them . . .  It was a very meaningful conversation for me.

I had to edit the hell out of the interview to make it digestible as even a long-form online piece. Same with the introduction. Lisa Carver! Lisa Carver! She’s done so much! I have so much to say! I rattled on, and then I halved it. Here’s something that got chopped: How I discovered Rollerderby in the magazine rack at Reckless Records, where I was shopping with my boyfriend in maybe 1991. I mean, I liked to shop for records, too—for about the ten minutes. And then what to do for the next hour? Finding a zine in the magazine rack that was brimming with gossip and sex and conversation was a thrill and an oasis. It made it OK to be a girl in the record store. Later, I would religiously pick up Rollerderby at Quimbys, when the store first opened on the corner of Evergreen and Damen and I lived just above it. Sometimes the content missed for me. Lisa’s obsessions were not all mine. Horses? No. Dismissal of Kurt Cobain and promotion of mandatory sparkling eyeshadow wearing for all ladies? I could only humor her on that. But the zing and rhythm and logic behind the sentences remained breath to my brain. I don’t think she’s gotten enough kudos as a writer.

In the interview, after I’d hit on all my questions and we’d wandered off into nooks and crannies of them and I thought we were winding down, I asked Lisa whether she had anything else she wanted to get into. And she did. And it was important. And I cut it from the interview. So I’m including it here.

Zoe: Is there anything else you want to get into?

Lisa: Yeah, we didn’t talk at all about substance abuse, and that’s part that a lot of people can relate to, and it’s a big part of how a lot of people find out about what they’re repressing. So I don’t have a. . .  I don’t know what I would want to say about it. I think it’s hugely important, and I see it among everybody.

Zoe: When did you totally quit drinking? And I know there were drugs involved too.

Lisa: I quit doing cocaine and in 1999, and I quit drinking and Xanax later, like a couple years ago. I was never an everyday person. I’ve never driven drunk. Alcohol and drugs were really a side story and were never a driving force in my life like they become for a lot of people. It was another way I abused myself, like anorexia. But what really bothers me is that my mother was a pills addict, multiple pills addict, and I didn’t really know it until…. I think until I wrote this book. And it’s probably why she let these things happen to me.

I’ve always been drawn to addicts. It really appeals to me, that kind of person. It seems like… wild and extreme and in pain, all things I relate to and enjoy being around. So I don’t think I’ve ever really loved somebody who didn’t have drug and alcohol problems. I idealized it. And of course I’ve always loved artists, writers and singers who killed themselves. So now to realize if my mom hadn’t been an addict she would have stopped it. She would have taken me away and protected me. Because she wasn’t a bad person. That just makes me completely change my feelings. Now I feel like throwing up about numbing yourself out to what’s real. But as I think about it, my mother was probably abused as a child and that’s why she got together with my father and why she became an addict because it was all. .. familiar.

Zoe: You mention that your dad was also abused as a child.

Lisa: Of my dad definitely was. There are lots of stories in the family about how deeply and badly my dad was abused. He had bones broken. And all of my aunts were said to have been molested by my grandfather, even as adults, and most of them committed suicide. My family’s all messed up. And then my mother’s parents died when she was a teenager, and all I have are her stories and they’re very sugar coated. But I do know her mother never liked her and said she was ugly and didn’t do well at school, and my grandmother adored my mother’s brother who was good looking and tall and on the basketball team and got good grades and knew German. My mother’s father was sort of a bum, and my mother said her happiest memories were when he would almost kidnap her and take her in the wagon away and her mother would be really mad, and I wonder about that…

Zoe: Your mom was also really ill, right?

Lisa: So many people have been abused as children. If you don’t let it into your brain, it plays out in your body. Every disease my mom had, she made it worse by doing nothing she was told, doing everything the opposite of what would make it better, and then she would doctor shop to get more and more drugs. She had more and more organs removed. She died of cancer at only 53 years old, and the reason she died was because she had hardly any organs left. Most of her functions were being done artificially at that point, so there was nothing to fight the cancer. Instead of managing her stress she was taking more and more and more drugs.

Zoe: Are you seeing someone now? There are a lot of patterns to be broken, a lot of patterns it seems like you want to break.

Lisa: I have the boyfriend I’ve had for going on five years now, and it’s very tumultuous. He of course is an alcoholic with mental disorders and social-emotional craziness. And I really feel close to him and not judged by him. Because he’s way worse than I can ever be, so I feel really really good with him, really super good, but on the other hand it’s . . . the craziness, all of a sudden it doesn’t look so good when you step back from it. It just looks abusive. So, um, that’s been . . . We tried to navigate how can these two unhealthy people who are really drawn to certain dynamics make this work. How can we act like normal people, because we’re not like normal healthy people, but we don’t want to be like we are any more. We don’t know what to do. I really literally do not know what to do right now. I mean . . . We live together. I don’t know how to live with somebody I love. And nor does he. But, we’ve been doing it, crazily.

Zoe: How old are your kids now?

Lisa: 17 and 9.

Zoe: I have a ten year old and a three year old.

Lisa: Ooooooo. I wish I had a three year old.

Zoe: Well, you know. Sometimes. They’re good to borrow.

* * *

There’s a lot more to Lisa’s story than anyone knew, then she knew, until now. But she’s still Lisa Carver. Not too much longer into the conversation she got me to make sex confessions, which I’m not going to share here.

I’m very glad she wrote and published __________.

But if you’re going to skip it (it’s long) or read it later, here’s the minimum you need to know: The piece is written by a young woman writing under the pseudonym Marie Calloway, and it first appeared on her blog as a work of nonfiction. In it, Marie goes to New York and hooks up with an older intellectual she became aware of and then propositioned online. The man has a girlfriend and is apparently well-known enough in certain literary circles that his identity–and thus his girlfriend’s–is obvious to some even when his name is changed.

I was completely drawn into the story. It nakedly addresses so many issues I’m perennially interested in and currently writing about or around: Gender, youth, age difference, sexuality, power, honesty, attraction, ethics, transaction, responsibility.

I was even more fascinated by the responses to it. Kate Zambreno’s post about the whole brouhaha was my starting point. Kate’s novel Green Girl was one of the most interesting things I’ve read this year, and I’ve been walking around writing an essay inspired by it in my head, especially since discovering a forgotten cache of journals from my early 20s and recalling…. but I digress.

This New York Observer profile of Maria Calloway  provides the juiciest gossip behind the piece.

This reaction by Roxane Gay in HTML Giant asks interesting questions about the ethics of writing so openly about a situation that affects a third-person: in this case, the male character’s real-life girlfriend.

The ethics Roxane examines and the power dynamics between a hot young thing and an older intellectual male and, especially, the question of whether you should ever sleep with a writer if you have any sense of privacy or want propriety over your own story reminds me of the issues surrounding the novel You Deserve Nothing, which is about a high school teacher who has an affair with a student and which was written by Alexander Maksik, a high school teacher who had an affair with a student. Few people knew about Maksik’s firsthand experience with his subject until Jezebel broke the story after Maksik’s student lover herself contacted the blog. She and some of her classmates were upset about how closely the fiction aligned to the facts, how similar some of the female character’s dialogue and correspondence were to the student’s own. They’d tried to get the attention of the book’s publisher and The New York Times, which had reviewed the novel glowingly, but they got no response.

On Gawker, Hamilton Nolan harshes on Marie Calloway and what he sees as the droves like her, young women writing confessionally about sexual exploits and the people who think there’s something meaningful in such writing.

Here’s Marie Calloway’s reaction to the reactions.

And I’m missing some good ones. If you head down the rabbit hole, you’ll probably find them yourself.

I’m one of the people who believes there can be much that’s meaningful in reading and writing about first-person sexual encounters. I also believe that we all have a right to write from our lives. Or maybe the matter of “a right to” is moot. We’re going to write from our lives if we can’t stand not to, and then we’ll have to face the ramifications. And I understand why there will likely be ramifications. The anguish and frustration Masik’s student apparently feels struck a chord with me. Maybe she should make some art of her own about the situation. Among the many things it’s been accused of, “Adrian Brody” has been called revenge lit–a girl’s getting back at the smart guy who walked out when she wanted him to stay. But putting something down in words can have a purifying, clarifying effect. And some pretty great song lyrics can fall under the category of revenge lit. How much does the gender of the writer have to do with the reaction of the public when the topic is sex?

There’s a lot to work through here. To tell you the truth, it was fun, but I’m glad Christmas is over.

Update: The Rumpus posted an excellent interview with Marie Calloway herself. Here.

As the author of this novel, it’s one of my great hopes for Currency that people will discover it while on the road. To that end, I’ve given some copies to traveler-types and asked them to leave the books, when they’re through, where other travelers can find them. If you’ve left or found Currency, I would love it if you’d leave a comment at http://zoezolbrod.com/the-traveling-book/. Happy travels!

I think there are about ten or twelve books that are floating around the globe right now, with most of them, fittingly, in Southeast Asia.  I’ve received only one note from a stranger who has picked up a copy completely by chance, but the story that woman told, in the comments here, was worth way more than a box full of books; it put me on a bus from Cambodia to Bangkok and then on route to Nepal. O World! I miss you! And Piv and Robin, I miss you too. When the two of them come alive for other people, it helps ease the sting—or maybe it just makes it more exquisite, which is perhaps the better goal. If anyone reading this is about to go on a trip and wants a copy of Currency to read and leave behind for someone else, let me know, and I’ll send you a copy

I felt sort of like a spy in PocNa, wandering around looking for the lending library I knew they’d have, wondering at the way things change and they don’t, checking out the tanned faces bent over glowing netbooks in the shade of the main courtyard.  (So many netbooks.) I inferred that a lot of hostelers were using the cushion of Isla and PocNa to recover from more strenuous travels, maybe staying on longer than they’d planned at a place with good wi-fi and a little night life. In 1995, still pretty fresh from the pristine beaches of Ko Chang, each of which could only be reached by boat, none of which featured accommodation other than thatched huts, Isla Mujeres felt urban to me, and almost unbearably commercial. I had never seen yachts and pleasure craft docked near a pier, and I had never had to pass by so many hulking hotels to get to a guesthouse.

But there were recognizable sorts at the hostel, and I quickly made the recognizable alliances, and with them I ended up smoking pot and traversing the more local side of the island for late-night conch and cheap snorkeling. Having found the bookshelf for freebies and slipped Currency among the offered titles—with the endless stream of wi-fi and the portable screens, how many fewer books do travelers read?—I headed back to the street, and I took great pleasure in standing in the entryway remembering the humiliation of having to be rescued from a communication problem at check-out by a know-it-all who’d annoyed me on these jaunts and who spoke Spanish. Mmmmmm nostalgia. I’m hooked on it. The then-and-now simultaneity is sometimes so physical it gives me vertigo, and I put my hand on the cement wall to steady myself. Meanwhile, Mark was waiting in the golf cart outside, dealing with the squabbling kids so I could have my moment. It was on the same island two years ago that he helped me come up for the name of this blog, The Next Youth Hostel. Get it? The journey, the journey. Still on it, in our way.

I haven’t been updating this blog much because my world keeps turning. Currency‘s been out over a year, so I’m not promoting it. I never intended the blog as a place to give personal updates, but to the extent that I did, now I use Facebook more than ever. And when I feel the call to write an essay, I write for The Nervous Breakdown because I love the community there, not to mention the eyeballs. I’ve posted essays about the my mom being on Facebook, the gang rape of the eleven-year-old girl, my reaction to the proposed opening of a breastaurant in my bucolic town, and my challenges with time.

I am quite time-challenged. I’m working on a new project—a memoirish type exploration that I’m vexed by and drawn toward—and every day I feel its hungry rumble for hours I don’t have. A fair number of those I need just to sit chin in hand and stare off into the past. What can I say? Pondering formative experiences is so attractive to me. This time the setting is closer to home. There’s a lot about sex and childhood and gender issues, those perennial favorites.

All year, I’ve been meaning to write about some of the highlights of the trips–the outdoor coffee shop in Austin that bore more than a passing resemblance to a backpacker cafe in Bangkok; the experience Brenna and I had at the awesome Olympia spa in Los Angeles; the waves of nostalgia I felt tromping around Seattle’s Capital Hill, where I sort of lived for half a summer a thousand years ago–but I never got around to it. When Dzanc asked its authors if they wanted to submit top ten lists for their blog, I knew I wanted to do something about the book tour, especially since so many of my reading memories from this year are related to the trips I took and the writers I read with. Here’s what I submitted to Dzanc.

1. Best Legendary Reading Series in Which I Had the Honor to Participate: Gist Street Reading Series, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The Gist Street crew invited Dzanc to be the featured small press at their annual (and final) cookout extravaganza and packed a gorgeous urban garden with a sold-out crowd and tables full of amazing food. Lights sparkled in the bamboo and laugher rippled in the dusk. Truly, it’s hard to be hyperbolic about how lovely it was. As an extra bonus, I procured there the best book of poetry I read all year, The Giving of Pears, by Abayomi Animashaun.

2. Best Reading Series I’d Not Heard of Before in Which I Had the Honor to Participate: Cherry Bomb, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, hosted by the charismatic Christina Olson and Elena Passarello. I’d learned already on my book tour that Davis Scheiderman can really liven up a joint with electrifying readings from his novel Drain, but he outdid himself that night and brought down the big, beautiful, full house of Corez Wine Bar. And the delicious cocktails we were comped did not dampen my enthusiasm, to say the least.

3. Best Reading Series Venue to Name-drop: The Hollywood Hustler, where I appeared with authors Gina Frangello and Jillian Lauren and with porn director Ashton West. (Neither of the guys in this picture are Ashton West, BTW. They are, left to right, authors Brad Listi and Duke Haney.)

I had already devoured Jillian’s memoir Some Girls on the plane to L.A., and I was even more thrilled to get it signed by her than I was to buy a bunch of Hustler matchboxes as proof that yes, I really did read against a background of naked ladies on Sunset Strip.

4. Best Tiny Bookstore that Hosted Me: Pilot Books in Seattle, Washington. This jewel-box of a store located on the second floor of a Capital Hill mall is impeccably curated by Summer Robinson. One of my best listening memories from the tour is sitting on the carpeted floor at the feet of Stacey Levine and hearing her read “Believing It Was George Harrison.” I look forward to seeing the story in the new edition of her collection The Girl With Brown Fur that’s coming out in 2011.

5. Best Bookstore Audience: Russo’s Books.

Look, this is a hard one, because so many of the audiences were great—and because I want to kiss the feet of anyone who comes to see me read anywhere—but not only did the crowd at this Bakersfield bookstore strain to listen attentively to Gina and I over the noise of an adjacent gaming meetup and ask thoughtful questions afterwards, but just about every single person in the audience bought both our books and then stood in line to get them signed. The reading was hosted by Nick Belardes, who runs the Random Writers Workshop there and does about a million other creative things on his own and in support of other writers.

6. Best Book Release Party that Wasn’t My Own: Gina Frangello and Allison Amend’s party for the release of Slut Lullabies and Stations West. It was a totally fun party, and I walked away from it with two excellent books. I didn’t want Slut Lullabies to end, and so I was rereading parts of it at a train station when a male stranger found it necessary to strike up a conversation with me about its title. The pleasure of the prose was absolutely more than worth the annoying awkwardness of that exchange. I read Stations West on the way back from the West coast, and I was so drawn into the Old West settings that I wished the plane would drop me down in Colorodo and Oklahoma so I could tromp the trail myself. Allison swore to me that she never set foot in most of the places she wrote about, but it’s hard to believe her.

7. Best Online Support System: TheNervousBreakdown.com. In addition to being my editor at OV Books, Gina is a fiction editor at The Nervous Breakdown, a site I would have listed as Best Way to Procrastinate until my book came out and I experienced what they could do to support an author. They invited me to participate in super-rocking events in New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago; featured me as an author on the site; posted a excellent review of Currency a few months later; gave me a reason to write a couple nonfiction features that garnered good comments (here and here); and, most recently, honored me with a Nobbie award and an asterisk after it that meant Currency shared the greatest number of votes with one of my favorite novels of the year, A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jenifer Egan. I am very grateful to The Nervous Breakdown.

8. Best Public Transportation Between One Reading and Another: the Fung Wah bus from New York City to Boston. Pulling my suitcase through Chinatown in hopes of reaching the bus stop reminded me of the backpacking that was an inspiration for Currency. The crowded streets; the sidewalk displays of gaudy knick-knacks and all manner of fish, fruit, and fowl; the mix of languages in the air and the jostling with sweaty strangers en uncertain route to my next destination: Ah, I loved it all. But unlike in Asia, once I got on the bus I had two spacious seats to myself, where I sprawled out happily and read Next, by James Hynes, an excellent choice of material for a newly middle-aged writer flying around a lot for a summer and leaving her family, not always entirely regrettably, behind.

9. Best Chauffeured Transportation Between One Reading and Another: Bryan Tomasovich. Gina and I are those annoying nonsmokers who bum all your cigarettes, and Bryan, Gina’s editor at Emergency Press, didn’t for a minute let on if he resented the drain on his nicotine supply that occurred once he picked us up at Seatac and drove us to Portland to read at Powell’s on Hawthorn. Not to mention that his wallet must have been quite a bit lighter after buying us all those beers to wash the cigarettes down. He also slipped me a copy of Tom Hansom’s memoir American Junkie, which I can’t stop thinking about. And his press, Emergency, not only published my beloved Slut Lullabies, but it’s going to publish Various Men Who Knew Us As Girls, by Cris Mazza, which is on my list of most-anticipated 2011 titles.

10. Best Worst Motel: A Victory Inn & Suites – Ann Arbor. It’s been awhile since I stayed at a good bad hotel. My room had mirrored walls, a mildewed smell, more lights that didn’t work than those that did, and a view of what appeared to be a semi-permanent encampment on the buckled asphalt of the parking lot. To get to it I had to weave through clusters of guys with shifty and appraising eyes. (How does this place have a proper web site and I don’t?) But the price was right! I was reading Freedom while I was there, and liking it. And I heard the Thai Restaurant that’s attached to the motel is really good. I would be happy to stay there again if I meant I could reprise the whole book tour experience. I’m looking forward to 2011, but 2010 was pretty great.

* A note about image-making: I’m not good at taking pictures, as I’ve discussed. For the first few legs of my tour, I had no camera with me and packed an ancient cell phone that could barely carry a signal, let along snap great shots. I regretted this at many points: Silver Lake was so pretty, and I so wanted to have a picture of Brenna and her charming home, for example. There was my book in the window of Prairie Lights Bookstore.  And there I was in the freaking Hollywood Hustler! Finally, in Seattle, with the stupendous Josh Feit leading the way, I biked to the U-district to buy an iphone, thus removing any excuse I had not to document my adventures more thoroughly. I immediately took a picture of Josh at the Jamba Juice next to the Apple store.

Then I took the aforeposted picture of my suitcase. And I seem to have not taken a usable picture of any of the many events I participated in after that. Gina holding the mic stand for Rob Roberge at the TNB Chicago event, the view from the Victory Inn and Suites, the lady love at the She Writes Everyday Heroine event at Women and Children First–all gone. Oh well. The images here were taken by other people.

The first time I didn’t have Thanksgiving with my family, Josh Feit and I made a mud pie as our contribution to a meal held at Mead Thompson’s house. Otherwise, I recall the menu as being very traditional. Mead was like that. But I didn’t want to be, and I was disappointed. The only other vegetarian at the table was Martha. She was probably also the only other smoker, those two life style choices often going hand-in-hand at Oberlin. We bonded over this, sure, but who knew then that Martha and I would go on to celebrate Thanksgiving together for decades to come? Who thought of decades? I had done the math to figure out how old I was going to be when it was time to party like it was 1999, and that’s as far ahead as I ever imagined.

The next year, Thanksgiving was an Indian meal that Steph Ault’s father treated Steph and I to in London. And the year after that, senior year in college, Sari and Martha and I had no tables and no chairs and holes in the floor and beams falling from the ceiling in the house where we lived, but we invited a bunch of people and had an awesome vegetarian Thanksgiving siting cross-legged around a big pallet that we covered with an Indian bedspread. There was a tofu curry and a tofu-based nut loaf and even the pumpkin pie, whose crust I believe was rolled with a drumstick, included tofu. Take that, bird killers! Take that, cranberry peddlers! We were free from the tyranny of family and tradition! Pass the wine! Now the beer! Please pass it again! Tofu and ethnic food nazis that we were, Martha and I ruthlessly mocked the family dish Sari put together–I’ll share the recipe here: cabbage, saltines, butter–but it turned out to be one of the most delicious things I’ve ever eaten, and we ate it for days, or for nights, rather, scooping it out of the old cottage cheese container we commandeered from a co-op when we came home tipsy from the Tap House.

My first Thanksgiving in Chicago was a low-key affair, my legs still wobbly from the jump to the real world. There were just four of us, I think: Suzannah and Bryan and John and me in the apartment on Crystal. But the second time the holiday came around, when John and I lived in the loft on Paulina, we had more of a come-one, come-all feast. Still vegetarian and scoffing at tradition, we used sawhorses and plywood to make a long table and covered it with (the same?) Indian bedspread. One guest–the sister of a woman I was friends with only briefly– was disappointed to learn that there would be no standard dishes, but she was a good sport and just trucked in her own turkey.

The year after that, I was in Sukhothai, and when I realized what day it was, or was told, I raised a glass across the guest house restaurant to the only other Americans in the place, a family. The image of them has stayed with me all these years. Middle aged people. Parents with children. It was as if I were seeing these things for the first time. Although I think of my backpacking trip as the pinnacle of my carefree youth, it was also, maybe, when the seed of a parent was planted within me. Further into the trip, I wrote children in a list of things I wanted in my future, and then I promptly forgot all about it until rediscovering the journal just a couple years ago.

Back in Chicago, there was a Thanksgiving at Archer’s apartment with the Chicago Rickets–Valeria and Maya and Gerald–where we had way too much food left over. Guilty and stuffed, we packed plates full and drove around looking for homeless people to give them to.

Then there was a Thanksgiving when I tried going to my dad’s, in New Mexico. I remember, with some embarrassment, that I insisted on not going to Joanne’s for the meal she was hosting–a traditional family gathering and the family not even mine, and yet sort of my dad’s? no way–but I did reconnect with Sara Zolbrod, my excellent cousin. I believe she and my dad and I cooked salmon; I was eating fish by then. I remember mostly the blue sky and Sara’s sunniness and the way she helped to ease my awkwardness.

And the next year was the first I spent with Mark. Martha and I were pesco-vegetarians, by this time, so we went to the apartment off Argyle he shared with Jim and we ate the shrimp cornbread stuffing he put in the cornish hens for everyone else, and I made a biryani. Then Mark and I moved in together, to the apartment on Winnemac, where, I must say, we experienced the heyday of Thanksgivings. Those were easy days of finding ourselves well-suited domestically and of being semi-settled but not settled down, not saddled. We could clean and cook late into the night in preparation, then booze it up and stay up late again with our great company, having great conversations–Sari and Josh were still in Chicago; Amy and Lee lived just down the street; Valeria, Tim, Tori, Russel, Jim and Heather, none of them had moved yet; and Martha was there: just because she’s perennial doesn’t mean she isn’t great. And the day after Thanksgiving, and the day after that,  we could sleep in, together, as long as we liked, and then take a nap later. Ahhhhh. That’s living. Around this time, I started eating poultry. And more than eat: I started cooking it. I made a turkey. And I learned how to make–and like–mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce and green bean dishes. It turns out, a traditional Thanksgiving meal can be quite delicious! Pass the wine! Please pass it again!

The only year Mark and I didn’t host Thanksgiving together was the year we decided to get married: Mark went home to tell his family and I went to San Francisco to visit Sari and Josh in their Mission apartment, and I shared a meal with them and a bunch of Stegner fellows. I saw Brenna on that trip. She had her girlfriend’s SUV and she drove me around. That’s not thanksgiving proper, but it sticks with me.

But oh! Wait! There was another year we didn’t host a meal: The year we went to Provincetown to visit Sari and Josh there. So maybe the endless series of heyday Thanksgivings on Winnemac was only actually a couple. Isn’t that the way, though. I notice that with Tillio, it only takes one incident to make a tradition, to suggest a recurring cycle: “And then we always…” he’ll say, about something he’s done once. But I understand. He means he wants to always.

When we moved to our condo on Glenwood we used Thanksgiving the way we had the first time we hosted in our apartment, as a deadline for getting art on the walls.  We were at the end of our brief disposable income stage: we bought a big farm table that arrived just a few days before the feast; we had matching dishes and silverware and glassware that didn’t come from a thrift store. I learned not only to eat and cook but also to brine turkey. Mark started making his mother’s stuffing recipe, the one with ground beef, that he’s cooking as I type, because I had started to eat meat. My mom came to town with her gentleman friend. They stayed at the Days Inn in Lakeview, the one at Diversy and Clark, and they drank heartily. But I didn’t. I was five months pregnant. I remember how heavy my feet felt by the time the guests arrived. I remember the half glass of red wine I savored. Amy and Lee brought their newborn, Simone. Things were changing, but things remained the same: Martha and Jim and Heather with her chocolate bourbon pecan pie. Sari and Josh flew in from New York. Russel and Tori and Bob Rugh.

We were in that condo for five years. Did we ever not host a Thanksgiving there? The dining room was big, the table was big. But putting on Thanksgiving is a lot of work, which I don’t think I really noticed until everything was a lot of work. I hadn’t realized that a baby is not only a baby who always needs to be held and fed, but is also a dirtier of dishes and clothes and linens and floors. Infant Tillio cried a lot, but he was miraculously good the first year he was alive in November, sitting in his saucer uncomplainingly for longer than he ever had–which might be for a whole twenty minutes.

But each of us is only an infant at Thanksgiving once in our lives. It wasn’t long before he and Simone and Enzo Macaroni merited an actual kids table, until they could be in the living room by themselves for a little while. Go crazy with the TV kids, and let mama have another glass of wine! By this time, the preparations were a science. Mark and I were a well-oiled machine. Maybe the kid-fueled Glenwood Thanksgivings were the heydays of Thanksgiving. Maybe I needed the touch-base with adults I loved more than I did when I moved among them more freely, at my whim. The group got bigger–not just with the addition of kids, but with adults. We met Sherry and David through Sebastian, Tillio’s first best friend from preschool. I met Megan and her daughter Renee at work, and it was as if they’d been coming for years. And Sari and Josh usually made the trek for the occasion.

They came to our first Thanksgiving at our house, too. Sari was pregnant, but she wasn’t telling anyone yet. That was the year Tillio got a wicked stomach flu in the morning and, with the turkey in the oven and with maybe ten or twelve people on their way over, we had to call everyone and postpone. Mark went with Amy and Lee and Simone and Martha to meet just-arrived Sari and Josh at Ann Sathers, while I stayed home stroked Tillio’s head, practicing acceptance. And we gathered the next day, which was just as well for Megan, who didn’t have Renee on Thanksgiving proper, anyway, and we had a wonderful time. Angela Brown came too, and I think that’s where she and Megan really became friends. A couple months later, at Megan’s birthday party, Angela met the man she would marry, an old friend of Megan’s. And before Thanksgiving rolled around again, Megan died from a blood clot to her lung. I think of her so often, and especially at this time of year.

Just writing those few sentences about her brought the sadness down. Renee lost her mother, and Za lost her best friend, and the Mathews family lost their sister and daughter, and I feel almost greedy to make my claim. But Megan was the first person who I loved who died. Certainly the first peer. She was 36. She was a single mother of a nine year old girl. Megan’s death marks a before and after, for me. We can die. No matter how much someone needs us, how in the thick of it we are, we can just. drop. dead. Is this realization when middle age truly sets in?

I can’t remember much about the next year’s Thanksgiving. I was pregnant again. Sari and Josh did not come. Jim and Heather were long gone, with  not only Enzo in tow but also now with the new Sophia. Angela was celebrating with Stel’s family, as she would forevermore. A family of friends is different than a blood family, and in many ways that’s good; it’s better. But there’s a lack of permanence. Although who’s to say: perhaps that is one of the better things. The pleasure-principal. The lack of calcification. There was a new couple, Christian and Michaela and their daughters Julie and Suvi. They were from Germany, and we met them at Tillio’s school and didn’t know them all that well, yet. Celebrating the American holiday together was the beginning of a friendship.

The year Lilli was a baby we retreated from Thanksgiving. The usual suspects were even more scattered, and I was so tired. The four of us went up to Zion and stayed at the Illinois Beach Resort. We ate at a seriously mediocre buffet and had a wonderful time, walking by the water, playing Ms. Packman in the 1980s rec room, swimming in the pool, napping. While elsewhere someone was getting trampled at Walmart, we were skipping stones in the lake.

But for myself, I think it’s wise to fight the urge to avoid effort, despite how overwhelmed I’ve felt at times in the last couple years. Last Thanksgiving we were back at it, toddler underfoot and all. Za came, our friend who we met through Megan, and Amy and Lee, and Candace and Nina, and Sherry and David, and ace neighbors Robin and Rick, to whom we introduced the pleasures of ditching the traveling-to-see-family routine. And Martha? Were you here?

Tonight the turkey is brining in the fridge once again, and the stuffing is ready to be put in the oven, and the cranberry sauce is made, and the house is, if not clean, then cleanish. When someone asked Mark if the kids were excited about Thankgiving, he told her that for them, it’s just a bump on the road to Christmas. That’s true, but not quite. Tillio told me that he likes to have a big crowd for Thanksgiving. That it’s worth cleaning up more, because it’s more fun. For him, this is tradition. We work hard to make a nice meal for our friends who, for whatever reason, don’t spend Thanksgiving with their family. And when they come, we enjoy them. I wonder what he’ll want to do when he leaves home.

My god. I don’t know who but me would be interested in reading through this list. But if you’re here: Chink chink! Happy Thanksgiving! I am grateful for my friends and for the family I’ve made with Mark, for the family who raised me. For being here.

I swear on my advanced reader’s copy of Currency that ever since I was a kid, I have had a fierce wanderlust. And ever since I was a kid, I was a voracious reader. And ever since I was a kid, I’ve been looking for books about women and girls who were adventurous, who were traveling the world. Those books have been hard to find.

Thinking about what I wanted to say about heroines, I stumbled upon a dusty but distinct memory of standing in front of the biography section at my school’s library searching the spines and covers for a book with a female subject. It was the mid-1970s in Meadville, Pennsylvania, and I was in the third grade. We’d had a couple introductory visits to the library, but this was the first time that we could check out a book, and I was breathless and almost panicky with excitement. The librarian had probably lectured us on the import of this event for many minutes previous, exhorting us that the books we checked out were our responsibility, that’d we lose our privilege if we weren’t mature enough to care for them well. I’m sure I would have been sitting up ramrod straight through the whole speech, quivering with readiness to defend with my life any book I might choose. I was a good girl, at that point. I was passionate about following directions. If I recall, I had headed to the biographies at my mom’s suggestion, made on the eve of the big day.

But there I still was in the stacks, undecided and confused at feeling slightly let-down, when the librarian started urging us to make our choices because it was time to check-out. Not having found what I was looking for, my state of almost-panic crystallized into the pure form. When she urged us again, sternly–if we wanted to check out a book, we had to get in line NOW—I grabbed the only tome that looked like it had potential, a red cloth-bound hardback with a silk-screened silhouette on the cover in lieu of a title. The figure squinting off toward a distant shore had an undeniably masculine profile, yes, but the fancy hat and poufy costume allowed me to convince myself the person’s gender was indeterminate. Maybe I was holding a book about a strong-jawed, sea-faring lady.

The self-deception could only be maintained for a few minutes. Standing in line to get my book thumped, I turned to the title page and saw I had chosen a volume about William Penn. (In that author’s telling, not such an interesting character.) The next week, not giving up on biographies, I again followed my mom’s suggestion and told the librarian what I was looking for: something about a girl. She showed me the three biographies of women in the library’s collection: Betsy Ross, Florence Nightingale, and Molly Pitcher. That was it. In a few weeks, I read them all. Molly Pitcher was my favorite. She had fought like a man! But only in the stead of her husband.

I’m not saying that those of us who grew up in the 70s were devoid of female heroines. Women’s lib was affecting pop culture even if it wasn’t yet hitting my ill-funded elementary library. Girls like me had Sabrina in Charlie’s Angels. We had Princess Leia, who really kicked ass in that first Star Wars movie. And, obviously, like the legions before us and since, we had Jo, in Little Women. I must have read that book a dozen times, and every time I felt sick—throw up, take to my bed SICK—when Amy got to go to Europe instead of Jo. It was probably Little Women that put Travel to Europe up high on my list of life goals—I would avenge my heroine!—even as it introduced me to the non-fairy tale ending.

Of course, Jo wasn’t the sole plucky heroine in the children’s fiction section (at least at the public library; the elementary library really had a thin collection). There were other spunky girls in kids literature, too. Lucy, in the Narnia Chronicles, was the first one to walk through the wardrobe. Meg, in AWrinkle In Time, was the one to go rescue her brother. Laura Ingalls was anything but delicate or prissy. But when I was considering what books I might want to mention on the panel, I couldn’t recall finding many independent, self-defining, adventuresses as I moved into adult reading material around junior high. Maybe it’s because I spent a lot of time reading pulp: I was quite familiar with Jacqueline Susan’s oeuvre, for example. I was fascinated by a book called The Mating Dance that featured heaving bodices and S&M-tinged sex. On the other side of the spectrum, it was in high school that I began my life-long love affair with Edith Wharton, but, even if their clothes aren’t falling off at every turn, her characters are all caught in the prison of their gender. Wharton’s books helped me define my nascent feminism, but there was no one I wanted to emulate in those pages. Who I wanted to emulate were the characters in On the Road. That book blew my mind, and I spent hours feverishly underlining the same passages multitudes of other teenagers had feverishly underlined: “The only people for me are the mad ones!” When my father told his editor, Beth Hadas, that I was obsessed with Jack Kerouac, she sent him a book to give to me, Minor Characters, by Joyce Johnson. It was a memoir about the years Johnson spent as Jack Kerouac’s girlfriend during the height of the Beat period, and I was fascinated with it. It was another book that helped me articulate some things I’d only up to then sensed about gender, and probably the first book I read in a genre I’m fond of to this day, what I call “I’m with the band” books, including one by that title. But taken as I was with it, I didn’t want to be Joyce, on the margins, waiting at home. I wanted to be, well, on the road. I wrote in “hitch-hike across the country” under “travel around Europe” to my list of travel dreams.

Within just a few years after high school, I had accomplished both those things, but I had felt like I needed a guy to accompany me. It wasn’t until I escaped from that guy in Barcelona and met two different independent women on the way back to England that I began to think I didn’t need male protection, that I could travel by myself. Coincidentally, my friend Sari, was at almost that exact same moment traveling in Egypt alone, and I hung on her words about it when we were roommates that fall. So it was the real women who showed me that I could go to Asia all by myself. And I know that my experience inspired other women I’ve met to not wait around for a companion if they have an itch to move.

There are times now, as a middle-aged person who’s been supporting myself and my family for years and who checks in on a dozen blogs written by women who are independently traveling and working around the world, when concerns about female agency seem dated, at least when it comes to middle-class white Americans, but the SheWrites panel got me back in touch with a wider-lensed view. It also got me thinking again about Robin, the protagonist in Currency. She’s a flawed character who makes some really bad decisions. She does not ultimately triumph. But I admire her willingness to take herself far, to get herself out of Florida, to get herself out of a job that she hated, and all without using her sexuality. I deeply admire her willingness to be for Piv, when she can, the provider, to be the pilot that takes them both to the great beyond. She doesn’t take her place by the red-hot cannon only after her husband gets shot down. She’s out there fighting for herself, on her own behalf. Especially when I was sixteen, or twenty, or twenty-five, it would have meant a lot for me to find a book like the one I wrote.

Anyway, it was a pleasure, in preparing for the panel, to think back on my reading history, and it was a lovely synchronicity, after several days of wandering the dusty stacks in my mind, to hear Audrey Niffenegger read the short story upon which her new graphic novel, The Night Bookmobile, is based. It’s a lovely book that will resonate with anyone for whom reading has been important and for anyone who likes to wander dark streets by themselves.