By Meg Rosoff on 25 October 2010
The premise of Nick Hornby’s How To Be Good was fantastic — self-congratulating North London liberals get stuck when ‘Being Good’ suddenly demands more than the occasional donation to UNICEF.
The book wasn’t fabulous, but I thought about it this weekend while entertaining three of my favourite people – one of whom (the well-read, funny, kind, intelligent, irreverent one) is an army pilot. His son is a sensitive boy who loves to read, and his wife is now the proud owner of all my retired riding jackets — because she’s tall, gorgeous, and looks like a Vogue spread on equestrian chic in them.
Our pilot friend is too discreet to say what he thinks the West may or may not be accomplishing in Afghanistan. But unlike the rest of us with opinions, he’s been there for two or three tours of action. The little he describes sounds hellish.
We’ve sent him coffee and books and whatever else we can think of to remind him that we’re thinking of him when he’s out flying missions, and we worry about him a lot. We get a very sketchy sense of what it’s like: Paranoid, boiling hot, boring, chaotic, morally dubious.
‘Civilians get in the way,’ he says simply, when I ask about the leaked casualty statistics in the Sunday papers.
And we make him more pancakes, and try not to think about how complicated life is.
Posted in Blog | Tagged afghanistan, How to be good, Nick Hornby, war |
By Meg Rosoff on 21 October 2010
She’s taking shape ever-so-slowly in my head and it’s time to name her.
This should be simple, but it might be worth mentioning that my husband and I took six weeks to name our daughter. We actually received a letter from the council saying that if we didn’t register our baby, they’d assign her an official name. An official name? What on earth could that be? Armani? Jazelle? TreyC?
I’ve since heard that unnamed abandonned babies are traditionally named after the King (or Queen) — so perhaps she’d have ended up Elizabeth. Queen Elizabeth I was nicknamed Gloriana, however, which is not very far from Gloria.
For naming characters, I haunt the more eccentric end of the baby name website spectrum. There are websites for old English, Norse, and Shakespearean names, and I get a lot of use out of the most popular names of various decades from the last two centuries, courtesy of the US census. John and Mary topped the lists in 1900. Seraphina, Violet and Isla can all be found in the US top ten girls for 2010. Asher, Atticus and Finn make this year’s top ten for boys. Weird.
I’m thinking of naming my fictional girl Mila. But the internet tells me it’s a (slightly skewed) acronym of My Life Is Average. And hers will be anything but. Guess I’ll just have to wait and see if it sticks.
P.s. Leon Uris’ Mila 18, is, as I’m sure you know, the reason that Heller’s Catch 22 got its title. Heller’s book was originally Catch 18, but Uris got in first.
Posted in Blog | Tagged catch 18, catch 22 joseph heller, gloriana, mila 18, my life is average, Naming characters, queen elizabeth, top boys' names, top girls' names |
By Meg Rosoff on 20 October 2010
I consider my personality to have been formed by Dr Seuss, and I have no complaints about that. The Cat in The Hat, with his sly anarchy (“I know some good tricks…I will show them to you, your mother will not mind at all if I do,”) remains to this day my role model.
But today it’s The Grinch Who Stole Christmas I’m thinking about.
The Grinch hates Christmas for the same reason the rest of us do (Christmas-lovers may absent themselves from the discussion at this point): “Oh, the noise! Oh, the noise! Noise! Noise! Noise! That’s one thing he hated! The NOISE! NOISE! NOISE! NOISE!”
The soundtrack to life is an incessant mumbling — TV, Radio, newspapers, books, e-mail, facebook, bills, obligations, appointments, arrangements. Information, conversation. Noise. Always worse in the run-up to Christmas, where the tinkling of tinsel and the jostling of Christmas carols drives a whole nation to the brink of madness.
But ideas need peace and quiet to grow. So for a few hours a day, at least, I’m turning it off. All of it.
Shhhhhhh…..
Posted in Blog |
By Meg Rosoff on 17 October 2010
I know I’m prejudiced, but I don’t think it helps to be a huge success early in life. Too much struggling to keep up the good work, too many people saying (cf, Woody Allen) that they liked the earlier funnier stuff better, too much of a sense that life is a long, slow dwindling of glory.
Look at John Irving (still most famous for The World According to Garp) or Martin Amis (Money) or Jay McInerney (Bright Lights Big City). What you really want in a career is a nice slow burn, a steady development so that (like, say, Hilary Mantel) you write your great novel late-ish, when your mind is clear, you don’t believe your own press, and you’re less likely to blow the profits on cocaine and stupid clothes.
Of course you can get it wrong in the other direction, like Van Gogh, and (despite wondrous talent) only achieve recognition after you’re dead. This also shows poor planning.
When my husband worked in Nepal, he says he remembers watching, bemused, as huge, musclebound climbers powered past him at great speed through the astonishingly beautiful Himalayan foothills, looking neither left nor right, eyes locked on the summit of Everest.
The journey is the destination. Worth remembering.
Posted in Blog | Tagged Bright Lights Big City, Hilary Mantel, Jay McInerney, John Irving, Martin Amis, Money, Mount Everest, Nepal, The World According to Garp, Van gogh, Woody Allen |
By Meg Rosoff on 13 October 2010
Doesn’t it just figure.
I’m desperately combing garage sales for thirty years in search of a Raphael or a first edition of Ulysses, and some Airforce Lieutenant Colonel in Buffalo, NY gets lucky in his own living room. Turns out the painting came into the family via a German Baroness who gave it as a gift to her lady-in-waiting. Nowadays she’d get Joe Malone hand cream.
Not that I’m killing myself with jealousy. In fact I think I might have learned something useful from this story — and that, dear friends, is the importance of hope.
Last month I found an old paperback copy of Kon Tiki and a chipped Quimper plate at our local fete. And just this morning I fished half an oreo, two broken pencils and seventeen pence out of my daughter’s schoolbag. Which makes me absolutely 100% positive that there’s a tiny Titian lurking somewhere in the house.
Just off to search under the sink.
Posted in Blog | Tagged Joe Malone, Kon Tiki, Michelangelo, raphael, TItian, ulysses |
By Meg Rosoff on 11 October 2010
Unlike most of my colleagues, the thought of a writing shed at the bottom of the garden fills me with horror.
I want to be near the front door (in case any of the junk I’ve ordered online arrives), near the telephone (in case someone with only my landline phones to say I’ve just won the Nobel, Booker, or Pulitzer prize), and near the kitchen to keep an eye on the mice.
Besides, I like my teensy office at the front of the house. It has a view of the street, which on a good day includes foxes, criminal activity, and domestic disputes.
My husband likes working at home too, despite having a proper studio nearby, and has filled the spare room with paintings, heaps of drawings, casts for his invention (that will someday make us millions), paints, ink, and the object most likely to be responsible for the eventual demise of our marriage — bits of blue putty rubber moulded into horrible little blue balls that I find all over the house.
So we’re building a painting studio in the back garden.
When I showed my husband the plans, he looked sad. “You don’t love me anymore.”
“What? I’m building you the world’s most beautiful studio!”
“Then you’ll change the locks. You’ll get on with your life and I’ll have to stand at the back door with my nose pressed to the glass.”
“No you won’t,” piped up our 13-year-old. “Mum’ll be living out there too. I’ll let you both in sometimes for a meal. It’ll be nice.”
What the heck. Maybe it will.
Posted in Blog | Tagged artist's studio, writer's shed |
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