Basking in the BookList review

When it takes 10 years to write a book, you have your moments of doubt and uncertainty. Will I ever finish it? Is this even any good? Why is it taking me so long? These are just a few of the questions that circle what you hope is not the dead carcass of your novel.

As I wrote, rewrote and wrestled with plot, there were a few fantasies that kept me going. One was imagining how it would feel to have a published book in my hands (that also included seeing it on the shelves in libraries and bookstores) and the other was thinking about it would feel to read a good review. (In my most doubtful moments, I would make up a review in my head to keep me motivated.)

So first comes the PW review which was great and as I mentioned earlier, a bit surreal. It's hard to describe the feeling of reading about your work in a review, it is close to impossible to be objective and even harder to make the connection that the story they are talking about is yours.


Next up was the Booklist review. Let me say, it helps not to know when the reviews are coming, in fact, it was better to find out during a lunch meeting with my marketing, publicity and editorial team at Random House that they had an advance copy of the review. I like the element of surprise, no time to think about it. So out pops a printout as I sat in front of everyone and read it. This time, that surreal feeling was replaced by a stunned silence and an eerily familiarity -- yes, this review was very close to my imaginary ones.



I folded the review back up and acknowledged how good it was and then enjoyed our lunch. On the way back to work though, I stopped on the street and pulled it back out and read it again as it to confirm I had not imagined it after all.

This review proved something I have always suspected, that anyone who uses the term "tour de force" when describing anything I do, rules my world. (Note: calling me a tour de force with cleaning bathrooms ain't going to get me to clean yours.)

Summoned home after a 10‐year absence by a neighbor's shocking phone call, Cat enters the farmhouse where she wasn't so much raised as pummeled into submission. A delicate lavender sheet of paper waits for her on the kitchen table. Written in precise, cursive script, her mother's suicide note—“He isn't who you think he is"—is diabolically cryptic. Is "he" her father, the abusive drunk who now lays dying in a nearby hospital, or the young son she gave up at birth? Though Cat has long since crawled into a bottle to get away from such demons, her mother's death forces her to relive and confront those nightmarish days when the solace she craved came in the arms of Addison, a young man who may once again prove to be her salvation. Thrumming with a desperate, malevolent intensity, Coyne's debut novel is a psychological tour de force, a disturbing yet ultimately redemptive tale of the burden of secrets and the tenacity of love. –Carol Haggas, BOOKLIST

Reviews, blurbs and blogs

Anyone who knows me, will agree when I say, "I have a very high bar." There are lots of reasons for this, many of which I have spent most of my adult life trying to understand. I have realized in the past few years, some of our best qualities are also the ones that cause us the most trouble. Take the need to be perfect. While logically everyone knows perfection is unattainable, emotionally it can often feel very different. My high bar is about perfection and the need to always get it right, absolutely right.

This quality has helped me enormously throughout my life, it keeps me learning and striving, pushes me to my limits (and gives me the feeling that I have no limits) and provides me with the courage to grow and to change. As a motivator, wanting to be perfect is a great one.

It's not so great for living in the moment. The quest for perfection skews your perception toward what's wrong. It makes you see the one slightly wilted strawberry in a basket full of plump ripe ones.

This is the lesson I am learning now in reading reviews of my book and browsing through book blogs. While the response has been extremely positive and very moving, I have noticed my uncanny ability to zero in on the one thing I can take issue with.

Some examples:

• An early reader wrote a great review of the book on her blog, praising it for the story, character and even saying she cried during several parts of the book. Then she ends the review by saying, "this is definitely not a beach read."
  
  I panic. What does she mean it's not a beach read? My book is coming out in the summer!

• Another reviewer said she had never read a book where the main character cries so much.
  
  My reaction, "OMG this is a sappy awful book!" Of course I neglected to take in all the other positive comments she had and her endorsement. (Upon further reflection I realized she was right, Cat does cry a lot.)
  


• Then there was the one where the reviewer did not like the book and said she felt bad because she had read on my website that it took me ten years to write it. (My reaction, "So it took me ten years to write something you couldn't finish -- great.")

Then there are the star ratings, the Amazon rankings, the thumbs up and down, the star reviews, blah, blah, blah. There are opportunities everywhere for a perfectionist to drive herself crazy (or maybe I should say "crazier")

Back when I used to do stand-up people would often come up to me and say they liked my last show more or give tips on how I could be funnier. One time a good friend waited for me backstage to tell me how offended he was by everything I said. (Everything?) Once I had a drink thrown on me by a drunken heckler and many times people walked out during my set. While I was in it, I focused on these things and struggled, there was no rejection worse than not being funny. Looking back what I remember most was not those stupid comments or harsh experiences, I remember the exhilaration of connecting with a room full of strangers, the communal feeling of taking them somewhere true and funny and leaving them in a better place. In other words, I remember the good things.

Perhaps perfection is too confining, in contracts your world rather than expands it. It defines more than it illuminates. If I could look back, now, on well...now here's what I would say, any reaction to your work is a blessing as it means you have crossed that great chasm from an idea in your head to a story that is being shared. That getting emails from readers saying they stayed up all night to finish your book is success, great success. That it feels good to connect to readers, even if your story isn't there cup of tea.

And speaking of cups of tea, make mine chamomile with some Valerian root -- this perfectionist needs to chill.

A Mother's Plan

I spent Mother's day with my mother this year for the first time in a long time. I came home to help her with the arduous task of cleaning out my Aunt's house after she passed away in December. My mother is no stranger to the hard task of closing down the affairs of a loved one, this is the third estate she has managed in the last ten years.

This one is the toughest though, as my aunt lived in the house my mother grew up in, and in cleaning it out, my mother is revisiting many memories from her childhood.

On Saturday evening we took a break and my mother invited my friends Gwyn and Lester and their teenage daughter Cameron out to dinner with us. Gwyn and I have been friends since our Sophomore year of high school and she and Les have been married since we graduated from college so they are part of our extended family and I consider their two children Wyatt and Cameron the eldest of my brood of nieces and nephews.

Cameron is fifteen and very mature for her age. When we got to talking about colleges she declared passionately that she did NOT want to stay in Pittsburgh and had a plan to live in England for a while, possibly Costa Rica, and was thinking of going to Sarah Lawrence.

She reminded me of me at fifteen.

From the time I was twelve I remember making all my decisions based on whether or not it would get me out of Pittsburgh. In high school I had intense crushes and deep feelings for a number of boys but no intention of getting so involved that I was tempted to stay. When I discovered a passion for acting that would draw me to New York, I too, declared I would be leaving and flaunted my desire in front of my mother every chance I got. "I hate it here!" I said repeatedly, "how could you have stayed here all your life? What is in Pittsburgh?"

I didn't consider my mother's feelings, that is not the charter of a teenager, in fact I often treated her as my jailer, undeserving of my compassion for what it must have felt like to have a daughter as determined as I was to leave home as soon as possible.

And I did. At 18 I left for NYU and never lived at home again (except for the summer of freshman year which sealed the deal against life in the 'burgh.)

At dinner on Saturday my mother asked Cameron questions, probing her about her interests and when Gwyn and Les talked about the expense of college my mother offered many suggestions and was encouraging about ways they could swing it.

When Gwyn said jokingly, "you can go to Pitt and stay here."

I responded by saying, "what did you think would happen? You took her on so many trips to Europe, you showed her the world. Did you think she would want to stay?"

And then it hit me like a ton of bricks.

My mother had done the same for me. She had worked hard to plan family vacations encouraged my father to take out a personal loan to take us on a once in a lifetime trip to South America, she exposed us to art, music and language. She taught us to read, helped us with our homework, typed our college applications and when the time came she packed the car and took us to college.
Here I thought all these years I had come up with the idea on my own. I had dismissed my mother's hometown as provincial and not big enough for my dreams...and all along my mother had made the space for me to have those dreams and had planted the seed in me to let me go.

Just as Gwyn is doing with her daughter.

How hard it must have been for my mother's mission to have succeeded as it did and how proud she probably was as well. When people talk about how tough it is to be a mother, that's what they mean, to love your children you have to let them go and to let them go you have to let them think it is their idea.

I guess that's also the amazing thing about a mother's love, the way a personal sacrifice becomes a daughter's blessing. I couldn't see that at 15, or 30 but am happy to see it at last at 48.

As for my feelings now about Pittsburgh? How do you think I feel about it? It's my home.

Pearls before swine

This weekend my niece Emily made her first Holy Communion. During the part of the mass where the priest asks us to shake hands and wish each other peace, I turned to the woman behind me and put my hand out. She recoiled and brushed me off. I stretched my hand out further toward her and offered a "Peace be with you," even louder. She stepped back and shook her head as if I were dangling a live snake in front of her.

Was it the peace she was rejecting? My hand? Or was she protecting herself from the ravages of Swine Flu? One thing is for certain, it wasn't very neighborly of her.

It's kind of a buzz kill to be rejected in church, even if you are a fallen Catholic. I turned back around and sat down feeling dismissed.

As the mass was winding down I distracted myself by watching the young boy in front of me trying to keep himself occupied without causing any trouble. He squirmed around in his seat, stood on the kneeling thing, and rolled around on the floor. He finally turned around to look at me.

I smiled. He smiled back and then out of the blue he held his small smooth hand out to me. "Peace be with you," he whispered.

"Shhhh," his father said as we shook hands. He looked back at me and we both laughed.

When the service was over we gathered our things and the little boy and I made eye contact and waved. The woman who repelled me stood alone with her arms crossed tightly across her chest. She may have kept herself from getting the flu but she missed out on the most healing thing on earth...human contact.