Immediate Notification of the Book Deal

I must admit that when the contract arrived in my inbox, I was in a very undignified place, involving multi-tasking in the bathroom and simultaneously powering up my Blackberry. (No, not that! Get your mind out of the gutter!) Let me tell you, yesterday I found out that it is not easy to utter a Shehechiyanu blessing with a toothbrush in your mouth.

It didn't go down the way I expected. I always thought the news would come by phone, that it would happen at work, that it would involve screaming and shrieking and being embraced by my colleagues and that I'd be on the phone all day telling the people who mean the most to me. But instead it was just a quiet spring morning, alone in my apartment, getting ready to leave for Passover services, way too early to call anyone.

Thus, I am pleased to announce that my novel, The Bookseller's Sonnets, the book that was sown in tears and now will hopefully be redeemed in joy, will be published by O-Books (a small house in Britain specializing in religion and spirituality titles) in June of 2010.

I had a provisional contract on Tuesday, but didn't want to say anything to anyone until I was sure. This is, you should know, all due to the help and guidance of my dear friend Sally, whose beautiful memoir, The New Jew, is now available on Amazon.com. Seriously, it's gorgeous. Buy her book. Buy it now. Do not wait.

But she is not alone in making this moment possible. Throughout the past two days, my mind and heart have been full of gratitude for the friends, family, teachers, colleagues, and writers who helped me along the way. Publication of an actual novel has been a dream of mine since I was 17 years old. It's so hard to believe that this day has arrived.

Is it an accident that this happened on the first day of Passover, the festival of liberation? Not that I'm expecting to be liberated from anything anytime soon - most authors I know have to keep their day jobs. But perhaps it is instead a liberation from the past, from the heartbreak that engineered the writing in the first place. Maybe it's a liberation from that dark time, when I thought nothing would ever be right again, that I'd be grieving forever.

My dear friend Abby told me just a few short weeks ago that those we lose in the springtime contribute in some way to our own spring awakening. And yesterday I listened to a beautiful reading about Passover, which contained the idea that a seed must break to give forth life, and just as it is hard for a seed, contained in its shell, to imagine itself as a blossom, so it is with hearts full of grief, in their brokenness, to imagine that someday they will be whole.

So my hope is that this will be the beginning of the beginning - that having given my whole broken heart to this book, that perhaps with it going out into the world, somehow my broken heart will be made whole again.

In the meantime, let the celebration begin!

When the Levee Breaks

I've never been much of a Led Zeppelin fan. In fact, every morning, when my favorite classic rock station does a segment called "Get the Led Out" at 8AM, I cringe a little. Not that it's bad music, but wouldn't that regular feature be better served by something a little less, well, anti-morning? My vote would be for the Beatles, of course, but even the Stones or the Who both have enough diversity of mood in their tunes that every damn morning wouldn't feel like a funeral waiting to happen.

Zep seems somewhat of a dark way to start your day. I guess the coveted advertiser demographic of males 35-44 prefers to get dressed to "Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You" or "Your Time is Gonna Come" rather than something a little more optimistic, like "Good Day Sunshine" or "All You Need is Love."

That being said, the other morning I heard a Zep tune that stopped me in my tracks. I literally had to sit and listen. Because "When the Levee Breaks" both sounded and felt like the way this month has been going: like everything's been systematically crashing to the ground, destabilized by a force of nature that no one and nothing can control.

The message of the song: shit happens. Nothing you can do about it, except bitch (sit on the levee and moan), and then decide if you're going to tough it out, or up and leave for Chicago.

I do have a Chicago story that relates somewhat to this. It was what I would refer to as my "Lost Weekend" more than 15 years ago, ranking up there among the freaking stupidest things I've ever done. Having broken up with not one, but two guys back in New York, I flew halfway across the country for a blind date, set up by a friend of mine in California. Got to Chicago, ended up seriously not hitting it off with the guy, and out of a sense of total and complete despair and loneliness, got more wasted than I have ever been in my life. I can tell you straight up that my only memories of that fair city are 1) falling out of a cab 2) waking up on the couch in the lobby of the hotel I stayed in, whose name I can't remember and 3) a queasy, hungover brunch the next morning with my dear friend Frank from grad school, after which we harmonized on Beatles tunes in his car, all the way back to the airport.

After that performance, I don't think I'm welcome in Chicago. But I get it - I know what happened that weekend. The combination of hopelessness, disappointment and jetlag simply got to me. I'd had enough. The levee broke.

But anyway, back to the song. I couldn't help but think that these past few weeks have felt like a levee breaking, an overwhelming, devastating flood of sadness and destruction taking everything in its path. I've witnessed the dissolution of relationships, ravaging illnesses, financial ruin. Worst of all, my community has buried two of its children in the past three weeks.

So I could really understand that one lyric: all last night, I sat on the levee and moaned. It was so easy to picture, standing at the precipice of water and land, screaming your outrage at an indifferent sky, knowing that the structure beneath you is at its breaking point, that in the morning it may in fact no longer exist. I hate that so many people I care about have gone to sleep in peace and have awakened to total destruction. It is so hard to find blessing in any of this.

And yet, even as I sit here typing, the young, earnest voices sing out from my computer speakers: Hang on to your hopes, my friend - that's an easy thing to say, but if your hopes should pass away, simply pretend that you can build them again. Or the song that's on my iTunes right now - this whole damn world can fall apart, you'll be okay, follow your heart.

I don't know whether letting oneself wallow in the songs that mirror your mood is the right thing to do - if I should give in to getting the Led out. Is hearing the message, "Going down, going down now, going down" what you should be listening to when you're trying to lift yourself back up? Or is it OK to acknowledge that downward direction for a while, knowing you're not alone, knowing that yours is not the only brokenness?

I guess every "mean old levee" teaches us how to weep and moan. Essential life lessons, but at some point, it has to break. It has to end. And G-d willing, soon.

her equinoctial tears

The above phrase is taken from one of my favorite poems, Sestina, by Elizabeth Bishop. One of the reasons I love it is because it describes a scene of some unnameable sadness - one that is continually present but goes unmentioned among the everyday tasks that make up our days.

Anyway, that's how I'm feeling at the moment. Today is my dad's yahrzeit - it's already four years, which is sort of unreal. There's not a lot I can say about the emptiness that I haven't said before. I just can't believe that it's been four years and three days since I last spoke to him. The last conversation was when he called me to tell me to be careful coming home from work in the snow. I wish I hadn't made it home. I wish I'd never had to go through the next three days and four years.

When does this get easier?

As an added bonus, the equinoctial tears that I'm holding back today represent the exactly six month distance between today and September 11.

Given the pain of today, given the knowing that a very similar, scary emotional context awaits exactly six months from now, cycling on and on and circling back for all of the years going forwrd, I'm fascinated by this sort of calendrical balance and the balancing act I've undertaken to try to get through them.

These two dark, still incomprehensible days stand as perfectly poised and equidistant as dancers who mirror one another's movements but never touch. And between them there is the same chasm of time, endlessly full of that same unnameable sadness.

Really, nothing else to say today. It's just been a sad, sick, horrible week, full of tragedies that I don't even have the words to talk about. I know those things should give me some perspective on today, but unfortunately the flawed and sad human being I am is winning out over the spiritually evolved one I hope to be someday.

I had originally intended to end this with some sort of blessing, but honestly, I just don't have the stomach for it.