The Color of Milk

Over the weekend I tried to write a bio. If you know anything about me at all, you’ll realize I’m a high school dropout with no credentials whatsoever and not a single accomplishment to my name, so asking me to write about my life is like asking for a page of lyricism about the color of milk. I drove out to the desert and sat for hours in the silence with my blank notebook in front of me and thought about how much time I’ve spent in my own head, the only sure escape from many an intolerable situation.

It’s strange to be at this point, to be asked to step out from behind the work and answer the cold-blooded question, Who are you? Who have you been?

Truly, no one. No one at all.

I became desperate eventually and sent back a bio that read like a litany of johns from the Mayflower Madam, because what is true of me is that my life has revolved around men. It always has and probably always will. Women are my sisters, one and all, but men are something else, more difficult and complex and tricky to deal with, harder to please, a wall of muscle I can never break through. I gravitate ineluctably toward the men most likely to inflict psychic pain when I fling myself against them. This is why I write the way I do–the fascination itself is my credential.

The bio was poorly written, with a wit born of shame, but I am sure as hell not going to volunteer the rewrite. I don’t want to think about me.

What’s your fatal fascination?

Interview with Catherine McNamara

Q: Congratulations on The Divorced Lady’s Companion to Living in Italy. The novel is a wonderful blend of fun and sexy plot with lyrical, literary prose. How did you find the voice for Marilyn’s story?

It wasn’t planned! I just started off with the title and first line. I knew I wanted to write in the first person for immediacy and intimacy, and I knew I had qualms about Italy I wanted to work through by seeing this place through a female visitor’s eyes.

I think she is a blend of women I both know and have imagined. I know I wanted her to be far far away from myself and my other writing. In that way she is curvy and yet hesitant (I’m skinny and these days I know exactly what I want), she hasn’t allowed herself much (I have probably demanded too much of others and myself), despite being a sexualised teenager years back (I was a saint then!). I think she is the voice of many a mother who’s become too passive, too neglected, too dull. She has accepted a life where the protagonists are other people – her teenagers, her philandering husband. In this book she returns to take up a rather kinky centre stage.


Q: And you wrote it in a chicken shed one summer. Why not the house?

Summer school holidays in Italy are long and stinking hot. My house is big and old with very thick walls but thin wooden floors you can hear everything through – snores, cereal in a bowl, more reruns of The Simpsons. I have four kids, three of them are male and there are often extra friends or cousins staying over in summer. Can you get the picture?

Plus the chicken shed is on the cooler side of the house, so far away that they could never find me. I had silence, just the breeze through the trees. It was bliss.


Q: Your descriptions of Marilyn’s initiation into the highly sexualized Italian culture are terrific. Right away she’s shopping for underwear. But she’s also terrified!

Compared to Australia and England (not sure about the US) there is a lot of eye-cruising going on. Always. I have friends who won’t go out into the street unless they are glamorously dressed. People – especially men – are not afraid to look you in the eyes and drink you up. It works well when you are older and given the illusion that you are still on the market. But worse if they are perving at your sixteen-year-old daughter!

I’m used to it now and generally ignore. It can be irritating if you want to have a lazy, don’t-you-dare-cast-your-eyes-over-me day. Or if you think how sexist it all is.


Q: There is an almost surprised sexuality that we see in Marilyn, a reawakening. Why does she need Italy to find it?

I don’t think women in the midst of their lives necessarily need Italy to revive their sexuality (although Italy is full of men who ride this notion). It is just that this is where I am living now, and after wading through a literary novel set in Ghana, a friend suggested I write something set in this country. It’s true that a great portion of Italian men pride themselves on their grooming and do dress well, and are very open to getting to know foreign women. So Italy – where a lot of flirting goes on – does provide a great stage for a sexual awakening such as Marilyn’s.

Q: The book is filled with colorful, eccentric characters. (I’ll admit to a fondness for Federico and a sudden desire to learn Italian.) Do you have a favorite?

This may sounds nuts but my favourite has to be Brett, the bi-sexual benefactor from Hong Kong. The fact that he has a merchant bank wife and a son called Percy, knows all of Europe’s leather haunts and yet offers poor homeless Marilyn a bed and employment – he still makes me smile. Probably too many Jackie Chan films and my kinky mind.


Q: What has surprised you the most about readers’ responses to the book?

That the sex factor, the weird club in Milan that Marilyn stumbles into, the vibrator scenes, just don’t seem to shock anybody. Even my seventy-year-old aunt!

Q: What did you need to change from your original concept in order to see this novel published?

Oh gosh, the concept never really wavered. My almost-agent said to tone down the sex because she didn’t know how to market the book. I think I did. Technically I also did a long run of 5am rewrites to clarify language, pace and detail. It’s so important to keep everything even. I did a lot of putting it aside, then concentrated revision. I was so pleased when I first met my editor and he said the book was well-written and wouldn’t need a lot of work.

Q: You have a short story collection coming out next year. Can you talk a bit about that?

I’ve been publishing short stories on and off for years between having kids and going in and out of the working world. I started with a new batch several years ago and was thrilled to publish well and receive good feedback. But I’ve always been told by agents or editors, Go write a novel then we can look at your stories. Or, I’m sorry but short stories don’t sell, couldn’t you turn these ideas into a novel? Luckily, there seems to be an upswing in short story collections and my publisher – who is an independent – is very supportive of my work.

The short stories are mostly set in Ghana, where I spent nine years before coming back to Italy. I am deeply interested in the effects of colonialism, the clash between developed and lesser developed worlds, cultural displacement, families. There is also quite a lot of sex and death! Without planning it this way, many of the stories are interlinked, as I just couldn’t let my characters go. I am really looking forward to getting this book on the road although I am dreading the long editing process – it is never-ending as you know!

Q: What advice would you give Marilyn over the Chenin blanc in Chapter One?

Hmmm. To any friend of mine who had just been dumped I would tell her to move away from her immediate surroundings for a while. Indulge. Experience. I would tell her to remove herself from the source of pain and examine herself when she is ready, but to look after her well-being first. Italy is always a good destination because on the surface it is not too contemplative, the weather is generally uplifting, and there are many beautiful vantage points (cafés, art galleries, gorgeous gardens, glamorous cities, the list is endless) to observe a people who seem attractive, vibrant bon viveurs. Also the language is not too difficult, the food and wine are soothing, and who can resist Italian footwear?

Thank you for having me Averil, and the best of luck with your new book!

* * * * *

Cat’s fabulous book is available through the link below, but I also have two copies to give away–and you know you want to read more about Federico. Just leave a comment below, or email me directly if you’re feeling shy. I will have my semi-honest 10-year-old pick the names from a coffee can to determine the winners.

*** UPDATE  *** The coffee can says . . . Sarah W. and Mary Lynne are the winners of Catherine’s new book! Email me your addresses, ladies, and the books will be on their way to you.

Buying link

Twitter: @catinitaly

Facebook: Catherine McNamara

Snapshots

Over the past year or so, I’ve gotten away from picture-taking a bit. Most of my time now is spent writing, and when I do break out a camera it’s usually a 35mm or the big bad Hasselblad, followed by a long delay for the film to be processed and scanned at my favorite lab in LA. I’ve never been one for snapshots, I like to make a production of the whole thing. But my sister-in-law introduced me to Instagram, and I have to say, I’m hooked.

It’s basically visual Twitter. You take a pic with your camera phone, maybe add a filter or caption, then click it right into your photostream. Dead simple, and so much fun. I’m using it as a way to document all the changes in our lives at the moment, and to keep in touch with some fast-growing children who are much too far away. But you can use it for whatever you want. It’s social media for those like yours truly who feel pressured by the quest for a pithy phrase and can’t be bothered to tally their ’likes’.

Look me up, if you want. See my new toenail polish and Monday’s tofu lunch.

What are you experimenting with at the moment?

Curlicue

An office email went out, stating that I’d put in my notice and would be resigning my position as of 4/30. Drew and I agreed we would say it was because of my writing, that I have this deadline to meet, blah blah blah. Really, of course, we’ve been saving for the upcoming move to Oregon for over a year and my resignation has nothing whatsoever to do with the book. Still, you have to say something, and Drew needs to keep his job until we find a place to live up north.

All day long, people have been seeking me out in tight corridors and the tiny kitchen cubby when I go downstairs for coffee. Why are you really leaving? Did you get another job? Did you have a fight with X, Y or Z? What’s the real story here.

I tell them I’ve written a book, that I want to keep writing books and maybe selling them.

Without fail, a look comes over my co-workers’ faces. It’s the glazed, jammed-up expression of a listener who thinks the speaker is certifiably insane–the slow, wondering question (a book?), a self-comforting hand cupped around the cheek. I know the expression well, I’ve worn it myself. It’s the open-faced nod I give my boss when she crosses herself for saying goddammit, the placating aspect I adopt when my mother starts talking about Muffy dolls or my neighbor urges me to vote Santorum. It’s the invisible wall that suddenly assumes height and breadth and the thickness of a bomb shelter, between a mindset you understand and one that is completely foreign and utterly mystifying. I could not be any more odd to these people if I flashed my ass and revealed a curlicued tail.

We should have come up with a different story.

Who do you not understand?

Posse

While I’ve been over here struggling with my nine-hundredth revision, some of our friends have been not only finishing the fuckers but publishing them and sending them forth. Our own Bobbi French has written the most beautiful book about leaving it all behind and escaping with one red-haired hunk to the wilds of France, where the two of them have discovered the wonders of pain au chocolat and the headache of Semur’s auto-école. France is a mixed bag, apparently.

And just over Bobbi’s shoulder, from a farmhouse in Italy, Catherine McNamara has put the final touches on her sexy new novel and is currently scouting for nail polish prior to her book’s big launch party. In London. These chicks get around.

I can’t tell you how happy I am for their successes, and how giddy it makes me to have secured such a posse of cosmopolitan friends from my living room in the rocky suburbs of Las Vegas. I imagine all of us meeting one day in some remote and enormous château, cooking together in a big warm kitchen surrounded by fragrant bottles of wine and crusted baguettes, while we laugh like children about our books and all the things that vexed us along the way. (And yes, I’d be trying to smuggle August in through the bedroom window.)

Someday, ladies.

Lots of love and congratulations to you both.

Superfreak

Yesterday my boss handed out certificates for a paid day off–it’s something the company does for each department once a year, and April is our month. I said, I should probably use this before you hire someone for me to start training, right?

She just looked at me over the top of her glasses and signed my request. I’m so popular here.

Ah, who cares, because tomorrow is now a paid day off and I have scored myself a four-day stretch to hammer away at my revisions. I’m fairly certain you are as tired of hearing me talk about them as I am to be diving in once more. Revisions are a bitch.

I don’t know what I imagined writing to be before I took the plunge, but what I know now is that it is work. Difficult, painstaking work. When people hear I’m a writer, they say, Oh what fun! or, Wow you must really enjoy that! and they think I’m crazy to demur. I try to explain that I love the challenge of it, the puzzle, the quest to find an evocative phrase. I like to focus my attention on a problem and solve it. But writing is a twisted pleasure. It requires a sustained and weary trek through a mental swampland, every single day. It requires obsession and a certain intellectual masochism, and the kind of perfectionism your third-grade teacher tried to discourage when she had to pry that book report out of your small, sweaty fingers as you agonized over the distinction between ‘hop’ and ‘jump’. Words have to fucking matter. All of them, all the time. You’ve got to fiend for them.

You’ve got to be a superfreak in a jam-stained cardigan.

Chicken or egg. Did writing make you obsessive or did you hatch that way?

Twirl

Today I put in notice at my job. My boss let out a squeal and laid her head on her desk as if I’d told her a comet was hurtling toward Earth and we were sitting at ground zero. When she’d pulled herself together, there was a pink blotch on her forehead and a scrap of paper stuck to her hair. I told her I’d be around for two weeks to train my replacement; she asked for three with wide, beseeching eyes and dissolved again when I held firm.

I left her office with a giddy sense of displacement. Soon I will be homeless, jobless, skidding toward Oregon with my pages in hand and my family in tow. In a book, I’d be writing a car accident for the heroine about now, but here in the real world it’s conceivable that I could be realizing two dreams at once: publication, and a home in the pines.

I know. But before we start counting our blackberries, I’ve got a revision to complete.

I’m planning another trip to my sister’s cabin in the woods, where I can be quiet and get my head together and slog through this latest round of rewrites. For now I’m simply filling my notebook with scribbled drafts of the scenes I need to add, but at some point they need to be coaxed into coherence and made to resemble the rest of the story. And my body is giving out on me. I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep since August first told me he liked the manuscript. Good news has that effect on me. My mind begins to spin. I’m a little girl in a party dress, wobbling around the dance floor after one too many twirls, and before you know it I’m flat on my ruffled bottom with scuff marks all over my patent leather shoes.

A couple more weeks. Then, provided the snow has melted, I’ll be heading up to Utah, shutting myself in, and finishing the fucker. Again.

Where do you go when you need to be alone?

Spike

A week ago today I sent out my first round of queries. I had my shot glasses lined up, my bottle of tequila at the ready. And for a few days, it looked as if I’d be spending the next six months hammered, chasing my ego with a bite of lime. Lots of, No, Averil, you dirty girl, slither back from whence you came. Mostly, though, these days the sound of ‘no’ is silence. Which is preferable to a rejection in my opinion, except if you’ve made a drinking game out of the query process.

But on Thursday, I got my first request for the full. Then another. Then a request for 100 pages from an agent who’d received my query only a few minutes before. Things were looking up.

The day went on. I wrote, I read, I ate a sandwich. Really I wasn’t thinking too much about the fulls except to wonder whether I needed to buy more limes. I spent some time looking for a job in Portland, revised my resume and found a couple of places to send it. Went over the budget for the move–again–trying to will an extra zero into our bank account.

Later that afternoon, I received an email from the agent reading the partial: I loved what you sent. Can you send the rest asap? Please? I need to know what happens!

Can I? Hell yes, because the agent in question had been on my radar since I first heard his name from a friend who was repped by one of his partners. This is a guy who likes thrillers, is wildly successful, and helped put The Art of Racing in the Rain on the NYT list for 2 1/2 years. Also, I read this article in Poets & Writers and found myself nodding in agreement over many of the things he had to say about the future of publishing and how writers and agents can improve their chances of being part of it. I liked his attitude. And I loved The Memory of Running, another terrific book on his list.

I sent off the full as my daughter and I were leaving the house to see The Hunger Games. We were settled in the back row, just hitting the bottom of a tray of nachos, and Prim’s name was being pulled from the bowl (no lie, exactly then), when my phone rang. I looked at the out-of-area number and thought, Nah, can’t be, that’s too fucking fast . . . But there was a message . . .

We pressed our heads together with the phone between us. The message was from Jeff Kleinman at Folio Literary Management. He’d finished the book and loved it and was calling to offer representation. Ten hours, from query to offer. That must be some kind of record.

So I squeezed my daughter and we did a silent little chair-dance, and I raced out to my car to call him back. For an hour, I stared at the marquee with the phone to my ear and listened to this passionate, funny, totally engaging man tell me how much he dug my book, what he thought we might be able to do with it, what might need to be tweaked. He was talking a mile a minute and to be honest, I was so dazed by the wonder of the whole thing that a lot of it went right over my head. I think I answered him back, probably with a complete lack of coherence which he was kind enough to overlook. I took a few adrenalin-spiked notes that meant nothing to me ten minutes after I wrote them. But one thing was very clear.

Jeff really gets my book. He understands where I want to go from here, and works at my speedy-speed. He’s a champion and an ally and a partner in (fictional) crime.

And he’s my agent!

Vibe

Yesterday I told my husband that I’d begun to query. It’s not something I would normally mention, but I’m nervous about the whole thing and I have a bad vibe, the kind that comes from wanting something too much.

Good, he said. Sell the book. We could use the money for the move.

Not for the first time, I explained that publishing doesn’t work that way. It’s slow, tedious, maddeningly uncertain. There probably won’t be money in this book, and if there is, the payout is a long way off. This is about getting an agent and getting published. This is writing, a labor of love.

My explanation felt narcissistic even as I gave it. Because who am I loving, really?

He didn’t have much to say after that. I got the feeling he was disappointed in me.

I don’t blame him. How awful it must be to be around someone who lives almost entirely in her own head, who spends hours and hours holed up with her pages and resents any interruption, who vacillates between a craven aloneness and the pathological need for approval that must surely exist in anyone with a big enough ego to imagine she can hold a reader’s attention for 250 pages. Until two years ago, he had a normal wife who engaged in her surroundings in a normal way. Now he has me. The least I could do for him and the kids is to approach the endeavor with the idea of making some money for them.

It might sell . . . I told him.

I know, he said. His face was very still. I’ve been waiting a long time.

What’s it like, living with you?

Zeitgeist

There is no escape from the Shades of Grey. The books are all over Amazon, the news, the review sites. A commenter at agent Kristin Nelson’s blog confessed that she and her friends had inhaled them:

I’ll man up. I read the hell out of it. All three installments in two and a half days. 800,000 words. BOOM. Just like that. I think I gave it four stars on Goodreads or something.



And here’s why: 

I couldn’t put it down.



True, it’s technically a mess. It’s randomly punctuated. The dialogue is all over the place. The characters are bipolar. The sex is vanilla. Typos abound (at one point Christian stared at Ana like “a bacon in the night” which made a weird sort of sense, actually). Ana has this really weird habit of doing figure skating jumps off gymnastics apparatuses. And it started out as fanfic, which I get the impression I’m supposed to be all up in arms about. But holy cow. Do you know the last time I read that many words in such a short period of time? Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.



Here’s what I think people don’t understand: Good hardly ever factors into popular or entertaining. People aren’t going to youtube, for example, to watch someone do something meaningful or profound. They’re going to watch some guy stick a lit firecracker up his bum. I would rather see Sharktopus than The English Patient. That’s just how I roll.



So there’s something to be said for things that are a little bit campy. I’m a little bit campy. So are my friends. When I got to the point in the book where I realized it was going to be one THOSE stories (I didn’t see a lot of Twilight in 50 Shades, but it totally read like “crack-fic” fan-fiction), the first thing I did was go on Facebook and tell two of my friends, “Hey, you have to read this.” Because it was absolutely the kind of book they would love. And they did love it. 



Nine copies sold between the three of us. We all felt like we got our money’s worth. Not because it was good, remember, but because it spoke that little spot in our hearts that loves those kinds of stories. The fact that it was kind of poorly written just made it that much better.



And I can’t explain why that is. I don’t know why this book, with its myriad of flaws, the least of which being its word count, held me captive in a way that other, arguably “better” books didn’t.

Well, who can argue with that?

This is the culture we live in, it’s useless to deny it. People would rather see Sharktopus than The English Patient, they would rather eat a homogenous, heat-lamped McBurger for $.99 than a plate of seasonal roasted asparagus for $5.00. They’re not after nutritional value or beauty or subtlety, they’re after cheap, government-subsidized non-food that tastes the same every time you eat it. Give ‘em your dollar, snarf it down, look for more. This is where we are.

This is the zeitgeist.

Any other epiphanies for a Sunday morning?

The Game

Gang, I’m going in. It’s time to query.

You’ll be glad to know that I’m going to spare you the blow-by-blow of the agent hunt. (Who do I need to blow around here?) It’s too awful. The hopeful beginnings, the form rejections, requests for partials, fulls (!) . . . more rejections. Kinder and more elaborate rejections, but still. I don’t wanna talk about it. I’ll let you know when I sign with someone or give up the ghost.

There must be a way to make this more fun. How about a rejection-letter drinking game. Get a letter, do a shot. One shot for a form letter . . . two for a rejection of the partial . . . a bottle of gin with a nipple attached for rejection of the full . . .

It could be a long few months. I’ll be counting the glasses.

Any tips on how to get through the query process?

Fifty Cents

This office is crazy. Filled to the fluorescents with lunatics. The weeping VP and interim CEO both resigned on the same night, at what was surely an interesting board meeting. We’ve had an audit, several inspections, a merry-go-round of suited individuals bobbing through our three office buildings, looking for reasons to shut us down. Drew and I are secretly in favor of this, since it would mean a couple of unemployment checks to ease our getaway.

Still, there is something depressing about working for an organization that can’t get its shit together. Everyone is angry or fearful or apathetic, waiting for the axe to fall. The new interim CEO (what’s that, inter-interim?) has been heard making manic jokes about what’s to become of us, and everyone has taken to checking their emails first thing in the morning: If the email works, you still have a job. Meanwhile, the directors are planning team-building events and barbeques during which they mill around exuding false bonhomie and handing out free tickets to the hockey game, while the employees gather in susurrant clusters and speculate on who will be next to go.

I’m hiding out in my undecorated office, with my bowl of blackberries and my busy-looking papers. The boss gave me a stellar review and a 50-cent raise, completely oblivious to the fact that my full-time job requires less than 20 hours of actual work. What the hell does she think I’m doing with the rest of my time?

I should be grateful, and in some ways I am. After all, the money I haven’t earned will fund our escape plan. But what I’ve discovered over the past year is that I want to be proud of my work. I want the job-application cliché: to contribute to the success of the team. I want to care about what I’m doing, and would prefer a boss who actually notices whether my work is crap. Fuck potential, fuck my professional growth, fuck the ladder. Give me a stack of data entry and count my mistakes. Give me something tangible.

Give me work.

What do you want from your day job?