what we talk about when we talk about bookshops

It was our first book discussion of the year  on a snowy January afternoon.  Maybe so many showed up because of the government shut down, one suggested. The museums were closed, and those with furloughed spouses needed some reason to get out of the house!  But whatever the case, there we all were - almost twenty of us sitting round a table in the library, a center of community, and we were all there to discuss Penelope Fitzgerald's The Bookshop.

Protagonist Florence Green is a widow whose imagination has been kindled by a vacant historical building called The Old House.  Having inherited money, she sets about opening a bookshop. "She was not much talked about, not even in Hardborough,"  Fitzgerald tells us, "where everyone could be seen coming over the wide distances and everything seen was discussed. She made small seasonal changes in what she wore.  Everybody knew her winter coat, which was the kind that might just be made to last another year." 

But the bookshop project is doomed from the start. The storage room is damp and cannot be used for books and the Old House is haunted by poltergeists. Then a moneyed arts patron in town explains that she's had her eye on the place for years, intending to turn the Old House into an Art Center.  And while other neighbors wish Florence well, they would really rather have a lending library.

There are very few solid customers. There's the scout who comes in every day after school to read another chapter of I Flew with the Fuher... "he marked the place with a string weighted down with a boiled sweet."  A local painter shows up with his watercolors one day, hoping to exhibit them there, and of course there's Christine Gipping, a ten year old girl who comes in to help.

So many eccentric descriptions in The Bookshop made me laugh out loud.  Christine - for instance, who forms a special bond with Florence, had broken her two front teeth "during the previous winter in rather a strange manner, when the washing on the line froze hard, and she was caught a blow in the face with an icy vest."  Christine has no interest in books at all. She has been sent to help rather than her older sister, since "now the evenings were getting longer her older sister would be up in the bracken with Charlie Cutts."

The establishment of the bookshop is central to Florence's story, but books and reading play a very small part.  It doesn't appear that Florence herself reads much, although at one point she orders two hundred and fifty copies of Lolita and arranges them in a pyramid in the front of the store. Neither does she have a head for marketing or for keeping her accounts straight.  So why, you wonder, did she want so much to open a bookshop?

That's when we realized in our discussion, that when we talk about books and bookshops, we are often really talking about community.  "To leave a mark of any kind was exhilarating,"  Florence reflects at one stage, while walking on the beach.  She is hoping to be seen in some way - to be recognized and part of a community. 

Our book discussion groups which take place every month in the library are a living example of this sort of community.  We can talk about anything when we tie it to the books we read together.  I also work at a bookstore in DC - Politics and Prose. The community forged there is invaluable in Washington - especially during these turbulent political times.  Book events each evening provide an intellectual sanctuary.  But those events are more about getting people into the store than about selling books.  And during the snowy days, the store becomes a destination to get you out of the house.  Where else can you open so many conversations with strangers, by asking what they've been reading?  But without the business sense to back it up, such a community would not be possible.

Florence's battle in The Bookshop is a battle to establish community.  It also reveals class tensions between the affluent people in town who want to establish an Art Center and the local working class people who don't have money to spend on books.  In the end, Florence's enterprise is defeated "but defeat is less unwelcome when you are tired," she reflects sadly.

Penelope Fitzgerald's light touch, and her insight into human nature, seems to make defeat more bearable,  as it does in another of her novels Offshore - where a bohemian family try in vain to live on a dilapidated houseboat.  Fitzgerald's characters have imagination, they are iconoclasts, but they lack practicality and money sense.  Their vision almost, not quite, makes things work. Fitzgerald made her subject their struggles against inevitable failure.  And they have such heart. They companion me and although I don't know why, they give me hope for humanity.

poetry and activisim in the life of carolyn forche

She was a young poet and translator teaching in California.  Sometimes, as she worked, she found it a challenge to distinguish between literal and figurative language in the Spanish language poems she translated. As her friend Claribel Algeria observed, she couldn't seem to understand the conditions from which the poems arose.

But all this changed when Leonel Gomez Vides, a human rights activist and cousin of Claribel, showed up on Carolyn's doorstep with his two young daughters.  He asked her if she was just going to keep writing poetry about herself for the rest of her life.

And so an education began, as laid out in Carolyn Forche's searing memoir What You Have Heard Is True. Leonel was to provide history lessons at her kitchen table, showing her what she had not seen before: Salvadoran history and the inconsistencies in American Foreign Policy,  including in the mysterious death of an American who had traveled to El Salvador under the name of Ronald Richardson. 

Several months later, Carolyn visited Leonel in El Salvador where he “removed the blindfold, and ordered me to open my eyes.”  

He took her to hospitals lacking rudimentary supplies,  dropped her off in remote mountain villages, while going on missions of his own.  Sometimes she wished she hadn't come.  But she wrote her impressions in notebooks, slept on pallets in the huts of the campesinos,  and washed with local women at a spigot of icy water.   She encountered a world where Bible study was enough to get you killed, your body dismembered and scattered to the dogs; where villages were decimated, their inhabitants brutalized in unthinkable ways.

Carolyn writes about a prison/sugar cane farm  that Leonel took her to - instructing her to visit an inmate there and write exactly what she saw.  And what she saw changed her forever.  “The woman who went into the prison in Ahuachapan left herself behind in a barrio called la fosa – the grave. ”

It was at this point in my reading that I had to put the book down - and text Carolyn directly.  But yet I didn't know what to say.  I was so deeply moved by what I'd read,  but the words that came to me seemed empty.  In the end, I sent a namaste. 

What You Have Heard Is True is the account of a young woman's journey from a poet who loved language to a human rights activist who used language to change people's hearts and minds.  The title of the memoir comes from Carolyn's frequently anthologized poem The Colonel. - written following one of her visits to the home of a high ranking military official with Leonel.  It traces her journey through the publication of her collection The Country Between Us and the assassination of Archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero, whose last interview Carolyn herself recorded.

Along the way, Carolyn was sometimes given scraps of poetry, written by young poets in El Salvador. They asked her to translate their work while protecting their identities.  "I never saw the young poets again," she writes. "I don't know what happened to them.  If they survived or are among the dead.  Shortly thereafter I wouldn't want to know who people really were or where they lived, where they were going or who their friends were.  After that night I kept poetry mostly to myself."

Except she didn't keep it to herself.  She went on to identify a new genre of poetry and to publish anthologies of this work:  Against Forgetting and Poetry of Witness - the work of poets who cry out from the soul in extremity, at times of persecution.

 I am grateful to have had the privilege of taking classes with Carolyn when I earned my MFA at George Mason University.  Prior to this,  I lived with my husband on the other side of her story -  on the side of the American government, not in El Salvador, but in Argentina.  My husband Ben joined the US Foreign Service in 1985.  We began our service with two years in Venezuela and three in Argentina. Naturally we also have friends in the diplomatic community who served in El Salvador - and let me just say here that they, like us, entered the Foreign Service with the desire to do good for the world but not always knowing how to go about it.

Having said that, I should also add that my husband ran a library in Buenos Aires and ran a program that brought American lawyers to demonstrate the oral tradition of American law and to conduct mock trials and find a way towards answering some important questions. 

In Argentina in the 1980s, I met people who had lost loved ones in the Argentine Dirty War. I taught students at a university there and on one particularly memorable occasion found myself in a difficult spot, when I asked if any of them had attended an Amnesty International  concert for Human Rights which I had gone to.  A rift opened up. My students fell on both sides of the issue - and I realized when I learned this, that in fact, I understood next to nothing about what their country had gone through.

What You Have Heard Is True is a powerful, painful and very brave book.  In writing it, Carolyn has honored those who lost their lives: forgotten ones, and notable ones  but always, always loved ones.   She will be speaking at Politics and Prose on March 20, and I will be honored to introduce her.

moon tiger spirals of memory

 Moon Tiger.  What an evocative title for a novel set in Egypt during the Second World War.  But it's  only deep in the heart of this book, in a love scene between protagonist Claudia and British army officer Tom, that we learn what moon tiger is.  Turns out a moon tiger is a mosquito repellent burning in a spiral, and gradually turning to ash.  When we discover this, we realize that this spiral corresponds to the overlapping memories in Claudia's life,  as she has recounted them in the novel.  She is with her lover Tom only briefly. But he is at the heart of her personal narrative, and we as readers understand this, even as nobody in her life understands.

Is personal history mostly a narrative carried in your head, independent of time and space?  Is destiny just what you make of it?   Claudia is an unconventional historian. In fact, chronology annoys her.  The novel unfolds as she is dying, as she reviews her life in a tumble of thoughts and disconnected associations. There are several voices, different narratives and many streams of thought in this remarkably spare novel.  But reading it feels like experiencing a whole life, a "myriad of Claudias".

There's Claudia's complicated relationship with her brother Gordon, to whom she measures every subsequent man in her life. There's her relationship with daughter Lisa,  a disappointment because, as we learn in other narratives,  Lisa hides her complexity from her mother as much as her mother hides her complexity from Lisa. Then there's Claudia's husband Jasper: "lover, sparing partner, father of her child."

The central section of the novel is set in Egypt - with her lover Tom in Claudia's narrative of her own life - and her losses connected to him.  Thus a difficult, overbearing and contentious personality becomes for the reader a lovable person with heartaches and complexity.

Then there's Claudia's relationship with Laslow - a Hungarian refugee who she takes on much later and who accepts her as she accepts him. Their relationship comes at the end of the book, and it's so  different to the one she has with her daughter.    "Laslow had always allowed his soul to hang out like coat tails and Gordon (her brother)  found this uncongenial.  He did not object to people having souls but preferred them tucked out of sight where they ought to be."

In the end, we find Claudia reading the diary of her lost lover. She has grown old without him.  He died so many years before so she left him in a different time and space.  Tom writes in the diary of the immediacy of life during the war, but  Claudia reflects, "Eventually we contemplate this apart. Years apart we are no longer in the same story...You are left behind in another place and other time....you are in some ways unreachable."

Oh, the inner lives we carry and then let go!  All those inner narratives! They're very different from the lives others conceive for us.  Things that are important to us, are unimportant to others.  Things we care about may matter not one bit, even to those who are closest in our lives.

It's as if we all are islands.  But as Penelope Lively writes, "we all act as hinges, fortuitous links between other people."

reading to our little ones

my son Alex reading to his son James

My mother read to us almost every night when we were children. When We Were Very Young and The House at Pooh Corner by A.A. Milne; A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson;  The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett and The Story of Mr Prettimouse by Margaret Alleyne were particular favorites.  My siblings and I were enthralled by her readings - and we also loved our father's bedtime stories which followed a particular script - Goldilocks and the Three Bears and Mr. Garibaldi, a story he made up, about a garibaldi biscuit who got captured and eaten at the end, by me!

I made him tell his stories the same way every time. At the end of Goldilocks, she promised to restore the bear's home to order, and although the porridge was all gone, she told them that if they liked, she would make them some cornflakes! We children always joined in with the final words of this story, as our father told it.

I also remember early stories that troubled me - like Beatrix Potter's Tale of Samuel Whiskers or Roly Poly Pudding.  I'd turn the pages of that tiny book, knowing that a dreaded picture would soon be coming up.  It was the picture that showed Tom Kitten captured by a family of rats and rolled in pastry dough. They were making him into a pudding, so that his ears poked out at one end and his tale poked out at the other.

But the stories that resonated for me were not the same stories favored by my own kids.  My son Elliot particularly loved Beatrix Potter's Tale of Mrs Tiggy Winkle - which had made no impression on me as a child. It's about a hedgehog who takes in the neighborhood ironing.   She sings a little song as she irons - and as I sang it, Elliot would knock the headboard of his bed - like the visitor knocked on Mrs Tiggy Winkle's door, signalling for me to stop. Interrupted, I would ask, "Who's that?"  And Elliot went into peals of laughter.  We must have repeated this sequence half a dozen times each night.  I wonder what it did for him and why he loved it so?

Mrs Tiggy-Winkle's song

...and the little girl who knocked on the door

My son Alex particularly loved The Stinky Cheese Man by Jon Scieszka - and Dr Seuss's The Lorax, while Rozzie's first favorite was The Cat In the Hat. She would imitate Sally at the end - striking Sally's pose after the shenanigans, when 'mother' returns from her shopping.  Rozzie also made me read what was for her a disturbing Beatrix Potter Tale Of Jemima Puddle Duck.   And now that I think about it, their favorite stories say a lot about them as they've grown up! 

So it's delightful to watch my son Alex sharing books in the evening with his three month old son James.  His little boy is already growing up with a routine that involves a bath and a book.  He will become aware as he grows, of the rhythm of our beautiful spoken language and the joy of sharing books together.  It's a wonderful gift to the children in your life.  I'm so grateful my parents gave this gift to me.

Happy Christmas everybody!

the year I found philip larkin

an ordinary looking man. a great poet

This week I read a poem by Philip Larkin for The American Scholar  Read Me a Poem. And while I walked my dogs this morning, I found myself reflecting on the year I first encountered him - not in person, of course, but in his poetry.  I was on a semester abroad at Wroxton College in Oxfordshire.  And that does sound odd - since England has never been abroad for me. Rather, it was returning home.

I had finished high school in the United States and went to Emerson College in Boston through their early admissions program.  Two years later, attending Wroxton as a study abroad student was my chance to go back home, while still working on my American BA degree.  Wroxton Abbey was a Jacobean mansion with sweeping lawns and sprawling wooded acres, in a tiny village near Banbury.

When I first arrived, and seeing that I was British, one of the professors asked, "Are you one of us or are you one of them?" I explained that my family returned to England every year, but I'd been a resident of Massachusetts for seven years.  "Oh," he said, "then you're not one of us.  You're tainted."

 My bedroom at Wroxton was enormous. If you happen to see a photograph of the abbey, my room is the one on the second floor, the tall windowed one, on the right.  I shared it with one person.  We had a view across the lawns. Our desks looked over the drive and the pine trees. Every morning I woke to the sound of wood pigeons.

All our professors were Oxbridge types and the courses were run in the British tradition with seminars, tutorials and frequent guest lecturers, including Shakespearean scholar Stanley Wells.  We were able to take in many productions at Stratford too. I saw the Henry plays - parts I and II and Henry V, as well as The Merry Wives of Windsor.

I was nineteen years old. Back in America I had just ended a disastrous love affair with a much older man. So I was wiser but also sadder.  This was my chance, not just to spread my wings, but to reconnect with my heritage, with grandparents and British friends.  I occasionally went to London to see my best friend Lucy and her circle in Earls Court. I shopped for clothes on Oxford Street and Portobello Road. I bought a pair of platform shoes in blue and green leather.  I went to the Hayward Gallery to see an exhibit of Sir Edward Burne Jones with a sculptor who used to live across the street from us in Surbiton.  We had lunch in her club.  This was the year the band Queen released their single Bohemian Rhapsody.  I bought the 45 and played it repeatedly in my grandparent's living room in Iver. 

During this era my blessing and my curse was to be pretty, intelligent and intellectually curious. And because I was nineteen and a sexual person, I longed for a man to take me on. The trouble was that the one who had recently taken me on spelled trouble. And this was why I had left the man in America - an Iranian who'd lived in England for many years.  His range of experience as well as his connection to England had all been part of the attraction.

My mother used to tell me about her girlhood cat Tinky- who gave birth to forty kittens. Mummy said she always mated with the roughest tomcats in the alley.  Well, that had been me.  Looking for experience - looking to be seduced and educated, looking for somebody to take me on.  I went for an older man since he  had experience, the intellectual and artistic chops to draw me.

But never mind all that, because I started out intending to write about Philip Larkin.  It's just that here I was - in a college where most of the students were female.  There were no boys I wanted to kiss.  No boys to flirt with.  For  recreation, I played the piano. There was a room in the abbey called the Gold Room with a beautiful grand piano.  Strangely, nobody went in there but me.  It was a massive concert sized room with tall ceilings and gilded chairs which matched the gilded rococo paneled walls.  I'd sit at the piano for hours and fumble my way through Beethoven's Pathetique.  It was quite extraordinary.  The room was so grand and I felt grand to be inside it, left to my own devices.  Once, my Shakespeare professor joined me there, and played a few improvisations of his own.  A romance was kindled - but not a very interesting one. 

So I took long walks by myself in the shrubbery. It was full of rhododendron bushes. One afternoon, I finished my shrubbery walk by peering through the library windows.  There I  saw my classmates with open books, cramming for exams. They looked up, perplexed.  Why was I outside when exams were next week?  Only, I was even more perplexed. What were they doing studying - on a beautiful day like this?  I couldn't understand it. 

I too spent time in the library - not cramming for exams, but reading poetry.  I should also add here that the abbey contained a private collection: The full library of C S Lewis.  I was in there only once. Why I didn't take the opportunity and visit that room again and again is beyond me. But I was young and foolish.  I should have been there for hours. But sadly, I wasn't. 

Nevertheless,  it was in the Wroxton library that I found a shelf of contemporary poetry - and discovered Ted Hughes, Thom Gunn and Philip Larkin.   I pored over their work - over Crow by Ted Hughes  in particular, but also over Philip Larkin's irreverent and beautifully structured poems.  It was the off hand tone of his work that drew me.  Wow.  You could write like this?  But how did he incorporate his command of language and form so effortlessly,  while maintaining such irreverence in his tone - such humor and ordinariness - questioning the standards and benchmarks of greatness.  As it turned out, he worked in a library in Hull.  He was an outsider who shunned the spotlight, but he was every bit as good as those in the spotlight.  In fact, he was one of the greats.  When I read Larkin, I entered a whole new world.

After my time at Wroxton, I returned to Emerson College feeling empowered, not just to study literature, but to try my hand at writing some stories of my own.   I published in The Emerson Review and later on in Ploughshares.  A few years after teaching creative writing at Emerson, I moved to New York City and worked for The New Yorker.

But I'll never forget that corner of the Wroxton College library - down near the front windows, overlooking the beautiful gardens in the back.  Church Going - the poem by Philip Larkin which I read for The American Scholar, will always be one of my favorites.

unrecovered moments that we know existed - on reading madeleine thien

This was one powerful book to read during Thanksgiving - a holiday where we heard that our president was grateful for himself, as troops were deployed to the border to keep away a caravan of asylum seekers and where the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade featured synchronized pom pom girls with plastic grins, a grotesque Sponge Bob hung suspended over laughing crowds.  How many tweaks would turn this into satire?  What have we turned ourselves into, I wondered, as my husband watched, and I turned away, to prepare with my son our thanksgiving meal. 

What is real?  What is true?  What is worth something and what is worth nothing? "Revolutionary music hurts the ears after awhile," Madeleine Thien writes. "There's no nostalgia in it, no place for people to share their sorrows."

What sorrows - the Macy's Parade seems to ask.  Everything is WONDERFUL!

But  "Beauty leaves its imprints on the mind. Throughout history, there have been many moments that can never be recovered, but you and I know that they existed."  These words are written at the top of a score by Sparrow, a gifted Chinese composer, and his daughter finds them when he is gone.  They come towards the end of  Madeleine Thien's epic novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing.  As I immersed myself in this incredible book over the holiday, it seemed to me the best I had read all year.

It's about the Cultural Revolution in China and the fallout across generations, including the 1989 student protests and massacre in Tienanmen Square.  It's also about music and the influence of Western composers on a circle of Chinese musicians at the Shanghai Conservatory.  It's a novel about friendship, love and loss, about the power of music written and practiced, but never heard.  Most significantly, it's about a secret Book Of Records, copied and recopied, each time newly encoded with Chinese characters holding hidden meanings, so as to record their stories.

Chinese characters figure strongly in the novel, right from its opening, when Ai-Ming, a young Chinese refugee, arrives at the home of Li-ling (Marie is her western name) in Vancouver, Canada.  Marie asks the meaning of Ai-Ming's name. "My parents wanted the idea of mi ming - she said - to cherish wisdom. But you're right, there's a misgiving in it.  An idea that is... mmm, not cherishing fate but not quite accepting it."

Later, Ai-Ming explains how her grandmother's stories, inscribed in the Book of Records, got longer and longer - and "I got smaller and smaller. When I told my grandmother this, she laughed her head off. She said, 'But that's how the world is, isn't it? Or did you think you were bigger than the world?'"

As I read, I began to understand how the world could swallow you whole. Ai-Ming's father Sparrow is a composer and his gifted student Kai (Marie's father) is a pianist.  Their love and connection carries much of the narrative forward,  as does the narrative of Sparrow's cousin Khuli, a violinist.  Their stories are unseen and hidden from the world,  but they are powerful and true, and once you get caught up in the stories of Swirl, Sparrow, Kai and Khuli - you all but forget the narrator. Marie's ancestral stories are bigger than she is.

Another important character, Wen the Dreamer, is sent to labor camp and when he escapes he must keep his whereabouts secret.  He makes it his mission to keep track of those who died in the labor camps. He keeps a record of dates in the lining of his suitcase and records them in the Book of Records - subtly changing the Chinese characters so as to preserve their histories. "When he finished copying," Big Mother Knife wonders of her husband, "did he go back to being himself or were the very structures of his thoughts, their hue and rhythm subtly changed?"

Because they are from the intellectual and educated classes, these characters are oppressed and tortured during Chairman Mao's regime. Each must make a different and very painful choice. One escapes to the west.  Most do not. As Kai tells Zhuli, "one day soon we'll arrive at the exits but all the doors will be locked."

As you read, you see how a whole generation is destroyed. The characters watch as fellow musicians and faculty members at the conservatory are mocked, tortured and killed. Sparrow must burn his glorious symphony, so that it survives just in memory - before he becomes a factory worker in a labor camp.  Much later, when Marie listens to his music  she wonders if music could record a time that otherwise left no trace.

Then there's the story of Swirl, Zhuli's mother,  taken to prison camp to be reeducated. When Sparrow finally finds her, after years of looking, he tells her he's been thinking about the quality of sunshine.    Let me just say that I read this part while I was at work, on my lunch break, and it moved me so much that I had to read it aloud for one of my colleagues.

"Daylight wipes away the stars and the planets, making them invisible to human eyes.  If one needed the darkness in order to see the heavens, might daylight be a form of blindness? Could it be that sound was also a form of deafness? if so what was silence?"

 For me, Zhuli is the most tragic and noble of all the characters in this novel.  As a young and gifted violinist, her love and understanding of Prokofiev and Bach carries her through the troubled times, even as she writes essays on discarded newspaper and butcher paper: "'Are we gifted?' the essays asked.  'If so, who cares? What good is this music, these empty enchantments that only entrench the bourgeoisie and isolate the poor?'"

At the end of her life, Zhuli asks her cousin Sparrow, "Haven't you understood yet Sparrow?.... the only life that matters is in your mind.  The only truth is the one that lives invisibly, that waits even after you close the book.  Silence too, is a kind of music.  Silence will last."

Do Not Say We Have Nothing is extraordinary beautiful, painful and complex.  If you want to know what it was like in Tienanmen Square during the 1989 massacre, you will find no more heartbreaking account than in the final pages of this book.

"The present is all we have," writes Madeleine Thien, "yet it is the one thing we will never learn to hold in our hands."  Or as Marie, a mathematician observes at the end of the novel

  "... to put it another way, dividing by zero equals infinity: you can take nothing out of something an infinite number of times."

#madeleinethien #donotsaywehavenothing

your story my story

My mother Judy, walking on the headlands with her dog Gerty in Sausalito.

Who am I? And how may I become myself? Paul Beatty poses these questions in his novel The Sellout,  a biting satire on 'post-racial' America. The narrator, raised by his father on a farm as a kind of racial/social experiment, decides to reinstate  the boundaries of a disappeared black township called Dickens, and later enslaves Hominy Jenkins, the last remaining survivor of the Little Rascals television series. Hominy is a national embarrassment, who belongs in the category of things to be eradicated -  "stricken from the racial record, like the hambone, Amos n Andy, Dave Chappelle's meltdown and people who say 'Valentimes Day.'"

I read the first third of The Sellout on the plane from Sydney to San Francisco.  The acerbic commentary just pours out in an endless stream. "The difference between most oppressed peoples of the world and American Blacks," Beatty writes, "is that they vow never to forget and we want everything expunged from our record, sealed and filed away for eternity."  As I read, I felt there was much I wasn't fully getting. So I couldn't stop jotting down notes.

My sister  Stephanie and I arrived in San Francisco several hours before we had left Sydney.  Also, it was spring in Sydney, summer in San Francisco, and soon I'd be back in autumnal Virginia.  But for the next several nights, I slept in my nephew Emmett's room.  He has a suit of medieval armor displayed on a mannequin in front of the window.  It was the first thing impinging on my consciousness when I woke up in the middle of the night.  That, and Noel Coward, Stephanie's  mangy old cat who had decided to sleep on my bed.   Jet lagged, I read a bit more of The Sellout  and when I got up to pee, mangy Noel escorted me down to the bathroom, waited, and followed me back to bed.

Stephanie's home is lively and colorful and not a corner of space there is wasted. It's decorated with masks and plumes, shawls, lanterns, cushions. Her husband Dylan and sons Oliver and Emmett all share the space, along with several animals.

Oh, didn't I mention the guinea pig in Emmett's bedroom, the cat with paralyzed back legs named Clara, or Nessa the pit bull? Jazz plays in the background while Stephanie, dressed in a gorgeous Sarah Bernhardt outfit  - usually hand dyed and adorned with fringe, produces an amazing meal out of her tiny kitchen. There's no counter space. Dishes pile in the sink.  

 Our friend Walter flew in the night we arrived, having just finished a production of Shakespeare in Love at the Fugard Theater in Capetown.  His partner Anthony, a violinist, was arriving a few days after us, to play a concert series.  Meeting them here had all been part of the plan.  I could write more - and probably will at some stage - about my mother's Shakespeare group and all the other animals and family members I have in San Francisco.  But for now let's stay in Stephanie's living room where Walter and my mother are talking about theater with Stephie and me chiming in.  (Actually, I'm combining things here, to make the writing more interesting.  In real life,  some of this conversation took place at a harborside restaurant in Sausalito.)

The topic was interracial and cross-gender casting, now standard practice in the British theater. But does it make sense for Laertes to be black when Ophelia is white? Does it  really matter?  Will a white actor ever get to play a part in A Raisin in the Sun?  Should not actors of all races and genders get a crack at the greatest roles in the literary canon? What about suspension of disbelief? What about consistency?

In The Sellout. Beatty does this hilarious write up of Hominy Jenkins' theatrical bio - listing his uncredited roles as busboy, shoeshine boy, toy boy,  and so forth.  I laughed out loud when I read it, but at the same time, felt a bit like the white characters towards the end of the novel, at a black comedy show. They are finally shooed from the theater : "Get out. This is our thing!"

The overarching question here seems to be what is my story and what is your story?

Walter sits on the sofa and mangy Noel Coward jumps onto his lap. At some stage Noel became so matted that Steph decided she was going to trim his fur– but unfortunately it never grew back so his coat now has these huge bald spots.  His thin pink body is visible in places, underneath the oily coat. Also, he scratches people. Walter pushes him back to the floor. "Sorry darling, but I loathe you."

I'm interested in the question of appropriation. A year ago, I finished writing a novel which features an important transgender character.  I did a lot of research - gleaning a lot of wonderful material from generous transgender people which informed my character.  The novel has done the rounds but has now been shelved by one agent and rejected by several others.  I doubt it will see the light of day, any time soon, not because it isn't good, but because I, the author, am not transgender.  There's the notion of "own story" afoot in the literary world these days.  If publishers are going to publish, let's say, one novel with a transgender main character, it will probably be a book written by a transgender author.

Then Stephanie told us about Scarlett Johansson, cast to play a trans male. She ultimately withdrew from the production after public outcry.  Why had not a trans male been cast instead of a cis female?

It all gets so complicated. And as a culture,  I believe we are working our way as sincerely as we can through thickets of identity.  In the end, we need to express empathy in our work- because that is what writing and performing is all about.  And we need as performers and writers to have the opportunity of range.  There again, aren't some of the most memorable female characters in classic literature written by white men?  Rosalind, Isabel Archer,  Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina. We cannot now dismiss them.

While I've been writing this, I've realized that the most enjoyable part was writing about my family and their animals.  I'm going to keep doing that.  In fact, while I was in San Francisco my daughter Rozzie called from Paris: "When are you going to start your memoir, Mama," she asked.  "My Animals and other Family?"

So yes, I've been writing it.  That is what I've been writing, apart from this blog.

I'm back on the east coast now.  We've had our book club discussion on Paul Beatty and touched on  many issues I raised here.  Bottom line: we recommend you read it.

Also I'm now back at work. Last night, at Politics and Prose, Lisa Halliday read from her novel Asymmetry - a book whose first half I thoroughly enjoyed. Second half, not so much.  It was interesting to hear her thoughts on cultural appropriation, though.  Readers have assumed the first part of Asymmetry is purely autobiographical, she said, while the second part, concerning an Iraqi American family, they assume to be fictional.  In fact, both story lines in the novel have truths as well as fiction woven through them.  If not for the ability to put ourselves as writers and creative artists into the shoes of others,  Halliday pointed out, the only available material would be autobiography. And surely that's far too limiting.