Carol Bergman

I have finally finished the 500 plus page 5th Jack Reacher novel. I can’t say I understand this character much better than I did at the beginning. Why does he roam around with only one change of clothes, for example? Why does he get attached to people, help them through the worst crisis of their lives, and then disappear? How can he intuit the way a criminal is thinking and suddenly resolve all the clues and mysteries in the last twenty pages of his story—after a gun battle in the dark and a damsel in distress rescue. Much of the unraveling of the plot is, in fact, preposterous. Action, action, action, interspersed with literary descriptions of the Texas landscape—lightening storms, the horizon, the vegetation. I waited for those sequences but they faded quickly into action sequences; a sentence or two and there we were in the car again chasing around, or being chased. I get bored easily so why wasn’t I bored? Because the writing was strong, it has force. And speaking of force, there were guns—lots of them and lots of detail about them. I know where Reacher learned about guns—the military—and why he likes them so much—they destroy the bad guys. Vigilante justice. Not exactly my cuppa either. So why did I persevere to the very last word? Because I was curious, because I knew he’d save Ellie, a six-year-old girl, and her mother, Carmen. Because Jack Reacher is a superhero.  Read More 

“Summers are for reading,” my parents told me and my sister as soon as we could read on our own. Cultured and educated, my refugee parents insisted on providing a list of “important” books to finish before the start of school in the fall. (This was before schools assigned summer reading.) I usually managed about one a week in between day camp, a round of soft ball after dinner, and a bit of television. My parents were strict and they wanted a report when I was done with each book. And it was summer; all I wanted to do was have fun. Dickens wasn’t fun. A biography of Albert Einstein wasn’t fun. A discussion about the definitions of words I didn’t understand wasn’t fun. I was expected to be serious, astute at a young age, and to excel in every subject.

I was serious but I was also an athlete, good at hitting the ball as hard as the boys and riding my bike down a steep hill as fast as the boys. None of the boys I hung out with had to read important books during the summer, nor did the girls for that matter, and I never let on that in private, late at night in bed or early in the morning, I was reading. That wouldn’t have been cool.

So I grew up with highbrow tastes and a judging distaste for low class genre fiction and for idleness and games, unless they were educational. But my mother was holding a secret: she liked murder mysteries, a fact she only admitted to me later in her life. They had to be Agatha Christie, Ruth Rendell, or P.D. James. Only the British knew how to write murder mysteries, she explained. Only their language was expressive enough. She took them out of the library but was never seen reading them anywhere, not even on the beach where every woman was lying on her stomach lathered with oil and reading fat, pulpy, sentimental paperback books, trashy books, according to my mother. What did my mother bring to the beach? The New York Times. If it was too windy to flip the pages, she folded it down and tackled the crossword puzzle, thus differentiating herself, her nose upturned, from the hoi polloi.

And then, one day, far beyond my childhood summers, I decided to try writing a murder mystery—an effort I have written about here—and it seemed to make sense to try reading one or two. Which is what I did. And to my great surprise, most were very well written as well as entertaining. And I liked the detectives, especially if they were women, because, on the sly, like so many girls of my generation, I had read Nancy Drew murder mysteries, and adored them, adored her. But when I was done, my agent said a very strange thing to me: “You haven’t written a murder mystery, you have written a thriller. And there aren’t many women thriller writers so how are we going to market this?”

“They can only be written by men?”

“No, of course not. But will men read your book if they know a woman has written it? That’s the question.”

Interesting. I’d written a suspense novel, a thriller. So I decided to read one or two to understand what I’d done. And because there are so many to choose from, I decided to move backwards from movies I’ve liked to the books they are based on: Jack Reacher for example. It surprised me what a good script that was, and how much I had enjoyed the story and liked—actually liked—the vigilante protagonist. The movie, starring Tom Cruise, is based on a book by Lee Child, a pseudonym for Jim Grant, a former British television director. The books have tinsel covers, embossed with evocative images. My parents would have called them tacky. They would have said they were beach books. They would have said that anything available on a drug store rack can’t be any good. And they would have been wrong. Jim Grant aka Lee Child, classically educated and a trained lawyer, can write:

“She looked preoccupied and a little confused. But she showed a measure of vitality, too. A measure of authority. There as still vigor there. She looked like the part of Texas she owned, rangy and powerful, but temporarily laid low, with most of her good days behind her.”

Simple evocative prose by a master of genre fiction.  Read More 

The copy-edit stage of book production is the hardest for me, and many authors, apparently. It’s the moment when the fever of writing stops and the malaise sets in. What have I created? Will it sell? If so, who will want to read it? What’s next? I never have any problem with this last question: my projects are lined up like an airplane on a runway. In fact, I begin to resent what I have just completed—the time it is takes to enter all the copy edits and then get the book into production—and can’t wait to get started on something new. That “in the moment” blissful sensation may be the reason writer’s always answer similarly when they are asked: “And what has been your favorite book/article to date?”

“The one I am working on right now. I’m just crazy about it. I think it’s the best I’ve ever done.” And so on.

Of course, we are usually wrong; we have no perspective. And, of course, we can’t really jump into a new project instantaneously; we need rest periods, breaks, a time to refuel.

What do writers do when they are not writing, someone once asked me. The answer is: the laundry. Even if there are maids and nannies to do housework, I am sure you get my drift. I think it was Margaret Atwood who once said: I always clean my own toilets. I, too, clean my own toilet, shop, do the laundry, and I also try to get outdoors into the fresh air as much as possible, no matter the season. And having finished a draft of my new book—“What Returns to Us”—I took my laptop and headed to upstate New York to visit my daughter and son-in-law who are homesteading there.

Day 1, Thursday: I sat for five hours in their kitchen nook, watched the mountains and the sunset, entered all the copy edits and sent it off to my agent. Finito, for now.

Day 2, Friday: I was awakened at 5 a.m. by the rooster. It was still dark. Was he confused? I read and drifted back to sleep. The blinds were up and I could see the white birches and the ornamental cherry tree causing everyone sneezing problems. Before he left for work, I asked my son-in-law to put me to work at some hard, physical labor. I had already walked with the dog on the road; it wasn’t enough. So he pulled out bales of hay and asked me to spread it over some fresh seeding for a pasture he’s creating. I did that for nearly two hours.

Day 3 , Saturday: It was raining. I read, wrote in my journal—the journal never stops—did some email, made a couple of phone calls, and worked with my daughter and son-in-law creating a bed for a blueberry patch. First the rocks had to be pulled out—wonderfully hard work—then roots of the felled trees pulled and cut, sawdust from the felled trees sawn into planks (all recycled) scooped onto the bed, then the loamy peat on top of that, and wood chips on top of that. Hours of work in the soft, misty rain. The dog stayed near us the whole time, sniffed and romped. The cat came out to have a look. They were in Heaven and so was I. We were all wet and muddy. It didn’t matter.

Day 4, Sunday: Mother’s Day which I have renamed “Nurturing Day,” and a communal brunch with friends and neighbors: French Toast, fruit salad, bacon (for those who eat meat), fresh home-grown maple syrup, and fresh-laid eggs. Then, reluctantly, a journey back to the city.

As I write, it is Monday, and I am at my computer full of energy for a new project which I will begin this week. I’m already feeling feverish about it.  Read More 

I recently began playing online Scrabble with a couple of friends. One of my opponents is an old high school friend. We live in the same city and have maintained our friendship over these many years—our kids even went to the same nursery school—and we get together for dinner and Scrabble regularly, alternating from one apartment to the other in a cycle of deepening friendship. Our online Scrabble is of the “normal” variety and a relaxing supplement to our three-dimensional games.

My second opponent—and a short-lived one as you will see—is the grown daughter of a good friend of mine, raised in Britain, who is now living in Italy. I have always found her so adorable and interesting that I thought it would be fun to reconnect via online Scrabble. So I invited her to play. Suddenly I found myself in a competitive game for points using filler words I had never heard of, nor could I find them in any dictionaries. The only pleasurable aspect of this game were the surprising British words—such as fairings—which, as an Anglophile who lived in England for a decade, I appreciated. American English seems attenuated by comparison and I cherish all words in the English speaking world, far and wide.
I spoke to my husband—who I can rarely beat at 3-D Scrabble—about my observations. Was my young friend using a tool to create words to get this kind of a score, close to 400 each game? “Most definitely,” he said.

Well, how did I feel about this? And, if true, is it cheating? I went online again, this time to see if anyone had written about the phenomena of “enhanced” electronic Scrabble. Many had. My favorite was this commentary: http://www.musingsat85.com/myblog/?p=5832

I wrote to my young friend to ask her if she used electronic “teachers” and “tools” and she admitted that she did. I understood that this new way of playing Scrabble is entirely normal to her, that it’s okay, it’ s not cheating. And, perhaps, if she had told me in advance, I would have felt differently, I’m not sure. At one point, I commented on the imbalance in our scores and was told, with an icon smile, that I wasn’t trying hard enough. In any event, I decided to say goodbye to my young friend on the electronic Scrabble board and to wish her well. Our two games were not fun for me. And Scrabble should be fun.

I remembered when my parents purchased their first game, the simplicity of its rules, the board, the wooden tiles, the invitations to friends and family every weekend to play a game, the breaks for food and conversation, the egg timer. As children, we were allowed to participate as helpers and later we were allowed to play with our own racks and tiles. Our parents were not native English speakers and finding words in English was a test in itself. The dictionary was only used as a final “authority,” and no one was allowed to crack it until a word had gone down and was challenged.  Read More 

I had brunch with a well-known literary critic shortly after the Boston tragedy. He’s a retired academic who also writes fiction, but he is not a journalist, and I have to remember that as I tell this story. Fiction writers are different; they make things up. It’s no wonder that journalists often turn to fiction writing—Hemingway, Cather, Twain, so many others—as it is a great relief not to stick to the facts. I have turned to fiction myself. Nothing has to be corroborated and the only disclaimer that has to be written is one about “no resemblance” to people either living or dead.

“Are journalists honoring or exploiting the lives of victims by writing about them? Do survivors want to tell their stories or be left alone? Where, exactly, is the line between being a chronicler and being a vulture?” These are the profound questions that are being asked by ATAVIST, an online media platform, in an invitation to a seminar for nonfiction writers taking place this evening. Even Reddit is engaged in self-reflection after President Obama and others criticized the crowd source witch hunt perpetrated on their site after the Boston bombings. “Suspects” were mistakenly identified. Who is to blame? Who is responsible? The proprietors did take responsibility and are making some more changes on their threads. But we have to remain vigilant as internet users—so fast and ready it’s scary sometimes.

What about fiction writers? What if a retired academic and literary critic, who is also a writer of fictions, creates a website to promote his book? What if this website lures readers to a service similar to a “bucket list” for the terminally ill, but it is entirely false; it’s a hoax? What if the disclaimer is nearly invisible at the bottom of the site and all the photographs on the site are of real people—including this critic’s beautiful wife—with false names? And what is the difference between a “fiction” and a “hoax”? What if? That's the prompt fiction writers use to generate their stories.

“What a sweet idea this is to take terminally ill patients on tours,” I said, just minutes into our brunch.

"It's a fiction," the well known literary critic said.

"I am shocked, " I said. "Terminally ill patients are desperate. They will try anything.”

“My publisher wanted me to take it down.”

“I’m not surprised,” I said.

“Well, I suppose if anyone contacted me and really wanted to go on the tour, I’d take them.”

“That’s good,” I said, “but it doesn’t take care of the problem. Your site is a fiction, but people who go there are not told it is fiction. They read it as true.”

Silence. This pleased me, of course. Like all bloggers, I wanted to have the last true word.  Read More 

Last Sunday was the first anniversary of my mother’s death. I met a friend of hers and relatives at the grave and read two of her favorite poems—“Invictus” and “Daffodils.” We told funny stories, we embraced, we laid stones on the stone, we went on our way. My plan was to spend the rest of the day meditating on my mother and I’d brought a sandwich, an apple, some water, my journal—life passes quickly into pages these days—and good walking shoes. I drove to her house to pay last respects there. I hadn’t been told that it would be torn down. It was a shock, I have to admit, all her plantings bull-dozed into the woods, the dogwood tree my step-father planted still standing, but damaged. The site looks clean, well excavated, a fresh start.

Every settlement is a palimpsest with its layered history and buried memories. We are usually not aware of what came before as we live fruitfully in the present. Refugee families are somewhat different as their history has been broken, the reason, perhaps, that the leveled house hit me hard. We had remade some history there and an illusion of permanence. When our daughter was small, we visited almost weekly, swam in the pool, had barbecues. Our dog’s ashes are scattered in the woods. I’ve written to the new owner to tell her some of these things and to wish her well. I know that her neighbors, warm and caring, will welcome her with all their hearts.

My mother lived until April 21, 2012. She was 99 when she died, alert and interesting to the end, listening to the news, eager to vote, eager to hear me recite newly memorized poems.  Read More 

If we learned anything during this hard week in the U.S. it was this: we have a post 9/11 rapid response police/military/intelligence “community” that can be mobilized rapidly, lockdown an entire city, and track “perpetrators” with high tech military weaponry. It didn’t take long for the war jargon to surface—after all we’ve been at war for the past decade—and to quickly lose any real sense of the unfolding tragedy both for the victims and, less so, the young perpetrators. It was the face of the younger brother that captivated, just 19 years old, radicalized perhaps by his older brother, or the legacy of the Russian genocide in Chechnya, or, simply, struggles with life in the United States. (That bitterness came out in the tweets.) Still, many questions remain unanswered. Empathic language about the victims, those who had been injured and died, permeated the discussion at the news conference. And the word “accountability” surfaced. It was a reminder that fanaticism is always challenged in this country—even in Congress—and that jihad may be a word that flies off the tongue, but does not fly in our Republic. I am even more appreciative of our freedoms—physical, emotional, spiritual—as I revise this blog than I was before the bombings. How dare these fanatics interrupt and disrupt our lives? However imperfect, we are free to live them.

There is a saying—and I don’t know where I read it—“Beware of the person who carries only one book.” In my iteration of this sentiment today, I would say: Beware of the person who is not honest/ transparent about his opinions, who maintains a furtive rather than an open life, who has hidden agendas, and makes bombs. Read More 

I went to the basement in my white-brick 1914 landmarked building with its old rusty pipes and three elevators that was once upon a time luxurious. Now it is run down and in need of repair—workers on the roof, workers repointing bricks—which I have already written about here. But it’s been quiet this week and I have been able to get back to the revision of my novel without needing to escape to other writing spaces (I have two) and this has been bliss. Thus, a moment to answer emails from students and to write a blog entry about a laundry room conversation.

I rarely meet anyone in the laundry room as I go there in off hours for my own convenience and also as an act of altruism. Those with 9-5 jobs fill the machines over the weekend. And I take my time, chat to Cleopatra, the old gray in-house cat with yellow eyes, browse the shelves of books people have donated, most of which are old and dusty and not to be touched or brought back into the apartment for fear of cockroaches and flying water bugs, most delicious as they are squished. (My husband saved me from one last night.)

I wasn’t alone yesterday, Bill was there, and I noticed—as he was putting his wet clothes into a dryer—that there was a book at the bottom of his cart and that it was a Kingsolver. So I asked, “Do you like her work?” And he said, “Yes, very much.” So we began to chat about her and her work, which led to other things, of course, about doing the laundry, for example, and the warm weather, and the elevator culture in the building, which is odd—people don’t talk much to each other. In fact, Bill and I had talked a bit in the elevator (I have 14 floors to descend, he has 13), but not all that much in the two years I have been here. And I thought to myself, how wonderful books are—in and of themselves—but also as entrée to shared experience and deep conversation.  Read More 

Went to the Metropolitan Museum yesterday and it was crowded. I’d sent my students on a walkabout to any museum as a mid-term assignment and one had gone to the Met and complained of the crowd, how she was jostled and couldn’t get close to the work, how her notes were all about being jostled, the crowd, and the guards telling people not to take photographs. No Photographs. No Photographs. One of my instructions had been: take notes. The other: eavesdrop and record snippets of conversation. The third: don’t Google any of the artists or the exhibition before you go. And the fourth, unstated, develop concentration, stay focused no matter what else is going on, a reporter’s discipline. Finally, the fifth, also unstated: find the story.

I wondered if I would meet any of my students; I didn’t. Standing in front of a vitrine of corsets for women (to my surprise, men also sometimes wore them), a visitor from Russia told me that, though her daughter is a size #2, she would not fit into any of these corsets. I took notes as she spoke. I took notes as she moved away. I took notes as I moved away. In fact, I didn’t stop taking notes throughout the exhibition: “Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity.”

Yes, there was a crowd; it was a crowd pleaser. I knew a lot about some of the artists, next to nothing about a few others. It was a group of artists known for their radical experimentation. They were so talented, so skilled, that they were able to earn their livings as portrait painters of the leisured class. That kept them eating and corseted in many ways but also gave them freedom to experiment. The stays came off.  Read More 

I’m sick but happy this week because 1) I have a heavy cold and can’t/won’t run around the city and 2) I’m not teaching and don’t have to read any manuscripts and don’t have to get on the subway where I probably picked up this cold and/or where my husband picked up this cold which we are sharing. Thank you.

I hope that my students don’t take this blog post personally and forgive me for being happy without them or their manuscripts this week even though I am being punished for my happiness with a bad cold. I am sure they will understand what it means to have time to write because we talk about their frustrations all the time. They go something like this: I have a full-time job and can’t find time to write. I have two young kids and can’t find time to write. I have two young kids and a full-time job and can’t find time to write. I have to travel to Chicago next week and I have two young kids and I am too tired to write. I have to travel to China next week and I am too tired to write. And so on.

What happens, then, when we do have time to write? We write without knowing what day or hour it is and we stop only when we are hungry or have a doctor’s appointment or some other necessary obligation. We don’t care about the weather. Rain or shine or wind, we are writing. Is it still winter? Is it spring? We may or may not feel hunger and eat breakfast at lunch and lunch at dinner. We may or may not answer the phone and not understand who is calling or why they have called. We are utterly and completely immersed in our work, and sustained by it. We write more than 1,000 usable words a day. We surface and it is already Tuesday of our sustainable writing week and we have hit 22,000 words of our revision. And there are still two days left of this bliss—until Thursday—when manuscripts must be read and emails sent out to my wonderful students.  Read More