I Am Stunned, Stunned, I Tell You

David Sedaris has finished with smoking! I am shaken to my core. What will he write about? His career is over!

I know that isn't very kidlittie, but, remember, I have my essayist fantasy to take care of.

Link by way of Justine Larbalestier because, come on, you didn't actually think I read The New Yorker, did you? Big magazine. Comes out every week.

Not Kidlit But All About Me, Me, Me

Literary Mama has selected my essay, Mom Memory, as one of its Favorite 2007 Literary Mama writing in the creative nonfiction category. I know I don't usually pay a lot of attention to "Best of the Year" lists, but under the circumstances...

Daniel Handler Does Essays

I forgot to mention in my party post that among the YA (or YAish) books my friends discussed Friday evening was the A Series of Unfortunate Events series. Two people didn't like the books, one person loved them, and I didn't get them. I loved the idea behind the series, I just didn't quite get the joke.

I was reminded of all that today when I read MONEY TALES
Author Daniel Handler aka Lemony Snicket talks about the last taboo, an article about Handler's essay, Wining, in an anthology called Money Changes Everything.

Since I enjoy reading about Daniel Handler, I very much regret that I didn't get into his kids' books more than I did. And now I've found out he writes essays, which makes him even more attractive as far as I'm concerned. If you can't get hold of Money Changes Everything, you can check out another of Handler's essays,Adjusted Income, a variation on the same subject as it turns out.

Look! Look! I'm In The Horn Book!

Today I received my copies of The Horn Book special issue on Boys and Girls. A goodly number of children's and YA authors contributed pieces on how gender has had an impact on them as readers or writers. It was very gratifying to have been included.

Please notice that alphabetically I come just before John Green and just after Sarah Ellis, who wrote a great story about Evelyn Waugh.That is not to say that John Green's piece isn't great, too. I just haven't read it, yet.

A Lot Of Talk. A Little Action.

I've written here a lot about what I'm sure many readers think of as my obsession with essays and essay writing. Well, now you can read my recent creative nonfiction effort, Mom Memory, which was published by Literary Mama.

That's one essay a year for the past two years. I'm going to have to hustle if I want to keep up that pace.

Perhaps I Haven't Gone Over To The Essay Side After All

When I came upon Anne Fadiman's seventeen-page essay on ice cream in At Large and At Small, I said, "Nope. I am not reading that."

I am not saying it's a bad essay. I am not saying there's anything wrong with ice cream. I am saying I have my limits.

What's Happening To Me?

I gave up reading The New York Times Book Review several years ago when a family member gave up reading The Sunday New York Times and passing the Book Review on to me. I wasn't too cheap to buy the paper. Honestly. But the odds of my being able to read two Sunday newspapers were very, very low. I would fall months behind just reading the Book Review. In fact, I bought the Sunday Times, myself, back in May and just found the half-read Book Review in my laundry room. I can't begin to guess what it was doing there. Besides not being read, of course.

The end result of my not reading the Book Review is that I no longer have a very good grasp of what is going on in adult fiction. I find myself standing in front of the new fiction shelves at libraries going What do I do? What do I do? So many books. Which ones should I take off the shelves and look at?

This, people, is why we need book reviews--so that people like myself won't be overwhelmed in libraries and bookstores.

Anyway, I was in I'm a Reading Fool's library yesterday freaking out in front of its sizable new fiction section when I decided to go look at the new nonfiction. I went right to the essay shelf and thought, Why, that looks good and that looks good and that looks good. I took a number of things off the shelf and gave them the once over.

And what did I find but Anne Fadiman's At Large and At Small, which I actually knew about because of a post at Chasing Ray.

How weird is that?

So even though I now have a stack of books next to my bed that is nearly a foot high, I read one of Fadiman's essays last night. I was afraid The Unfuzzy Lamb was going to be about nature or agriculture because the first essay in the collection appeared to be about collecting butterfies, which led me to skip it. But, no, The Unfuzzy Lamb is about Charles Lamb.

Now, I actually have a modest interest in Lamb. He was one of the more accessible writers in my Romantic Period class as an undergraduate. (Though I found myself strangely attracted to Thomas DeQuincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater, too.) I have a vague recollection of beginning some kind of contemporary version of Lamb's Dream Children many years ago. God only knows what happened to that.

Anyway, Fadiman's essay on Lamb was very readable and interesting. But what I kept thinking as I read it was, Where do you publish an essay on Charles Lamb? And who the Hell is going to read it? Besides me, of course. It turns out Fadiman published her Lamb essay in The American Scholar, not a publication that I have a lot of familiarity with. Or, to be honest, had even heard of before last night. It may publish essays about Lamb all the time, and I'd never know.

I've read Fadiman's Ex Libris, though I can't say it made much of an impression on me. I know it is somewhere in this house, and I can even pinpoint the room. Beyond that, it will probably be a major effort to find it. But it might be worth taking another look.

Anyway, my post title is What's Happening To Me? so I should get around to saying something about that. What I'll say is I went into a library, was flummoxed in front of the fiction and happy in front of the essays. That's a shift, people. I'm shifting. That's what's happening to me.

Well, Yes, A Lot Of Them Were Depressing

I read many of the essays in The Best American Essays 2006 and liked what I read. Lauren Slater was the guest editor who had the task of making the final cut from around one hundred essays that had been screened for her. She admits she was dwelling on death a bit, and a lot of the essays at least flirted with that subject. One of my favorites, Grammar Lessons by Michele Morano, deals with a depressing romance, which isn't death but still a downer. (The author now has a book of essays out called Grammar Lessons.)

Oddly enough, I happen to own a copy of The Best American Essays of 1996, which I never read much of because I didn't care for it. I'm going to take another look. Perhaps my tastes have matured in the last ten years. Or at least changed.

How Weird Is This?

Last night I read Sam Pickering's essay, George, in The Best American Essays 2006. This morning, I skimmed an interview with Anne Fadiman that I heard about through Chasing Ray. In the interview, Fadiman discusses "familiar essays."

My first thought was, Dear God, I just can't keep up. "Familiar essays?" Fadiman describes them as being a subset of the personal essay. "...it is about the author, so it is a subset of the personal essay, but it is also about a subject." Hmmm. I thought the personal essay was about something related to the author that had universal significance. Wouldn't that "something related to the author" be "a subject?" Do we really need two terms?

Then I started thinking about Pickering's essay, George. Wouldn't that be called a familiar essay?

The thing is, though, Pickering was the teacher for the only graduate course I've ever attended, and I don't recall him using the term "familiar essay." Unless, of course, he used it during the first two or three class sessions when I had trouble understanding him because he speaks with a heavy southern accent.

So, anyway, I started hunting for George on-line because it was originally published in a journal and journals sometimes post content on-line. I didn't find it, but I did find Sam Pickering's curriculum vitae, and on it he divides his writings under various categories. Lo and behold, one of them is "Familiar Essays." And toward the end of the nearly seven pages of titles, you'll find George.

How bizarre is that? I've never heard of the term "familiar essay" until this morning, at which point I realize I'd just read one last night.

I'm thinking of writing a familiar essay about having my ceilings painted.

By the way, BDT is very fond of Pickering's book, Letters to a Teacher.

Why I Nag

A family member has asked several times recently why I seem to be so committed to nagging. One day I realized that the subject of nagging would make a great essay topic. Why I Nag. I could cover the rewards of nagging (it works), my connection to a long line of honorable naggers through my maternal line, nagging's place in the greater society, how nagging has been perceived throughout history, turning points in history that were influenced by nagging, nagging as the foundation of the American family...

I see this piece ending up as one of those never-ending New Yorker articles. Hell, I see it ending up as a book.

When I told my family member that I thought Why I Nag would make a great essay topic, he said, "How come you want to write about everything that happens? Everything?"

And I thought, Gee, that would make a great essay. I could write about all the things from my life that inspired every aspect of my books. And then I could get started on all the life experiences that inspired my unpublished writings, of which I have very, very many. And when I finished with that, I could write about all the things I've been inspired to write but haven't gotten around to yet. And then...