2008!!!! REALLY?

Weren’t we just partying like it’s 1999? How can it be 2008?!

Time can slip by so fast, it’s easy to let it slip through our fingers. For us, this last year has been so packed with great highs and tremendous challenges, it’s hard to believe it all happened in 365 days!

Well, we’re ready for the new year and excited about all of the possibilities. We’re eager to hear what readers think about Gotta Keep on Tryin’. We’re excited about working to get Tryin’ to Sleep in the Bed You Made, the Movie into production. We’ll also have more movie news—about another book to film project—for you in the coming year. And we’re both looking forward to some time to kick back—haven’t had any of that in quite a while.

We wish you a New Year that fulfills and inspires you, the good health and well being to enjoy it, and great friends and family to share it with! Bring on 2008!

9/11 BEFORE AND AFTER

Six years ago---we all remember exactly where we were-THAT DAY.

Just as previous generations remember where they were when they heard about Pearl Harbor (Probably on the radio. We weren’t born yet). Or where they were when JFK (Virginia—in the library of Fillmore Junior H.S. in Buffalo checking out books for the weekend. Donna--in Sister Helen's second grade class. The nuns were crying so we knew something was wrong.), Dr.King ( Virginia—on the campus of Fisk University in Nashville, listening to sirens and shots that were far too close. Donna had just come home from junior high and was alone, in front of the TV.), and Bobby Kennedy (Virginia—at home in Buffalo, NY, in my living room with my family watching as it unfolded on television. Donna--the same, but in Brooklyn, NY) were assassinated. The minutest details of what transpired in our lives on those ordinary days—the moment before and the moment after we heard the news—are branded in our memory because those events changed us—both singularly and as a culture—forever. We can mark time as before and after.

About ten years ago there was a movie called Before and After. Meryl Streep and Liam Neeson played the parents of a teen accused of murdering his girlfriend. Their reactions to the crisis are completely opposite. Though the subject matter and the inciting incident are not at all the same as the events of 9/11, the film pointed out how irrevocably, and differently lives can be altered by a single shattering event. And especially how the incident divides time into “pre” and “post.”


Six years ago we all became those parents. Our memories of THAT DAY are unique, specific, indelible and for better and worse, life altering.
A simple example—

Before—We were in our separate homes that morning, full of excitement and anticipation, and yakking on the phone about what we were going to wear, as we prepared for lunch in the City with our editor and publicist. We were going to talk about PR and marketing plans for the paperback release of Far From the Tree. We loved those lunches (at swank restaurants with hard to get reservations. You can order whatever your heart desires, with no concern for the bill.) Those afternoons, can feel giddy—like we’ve stepped into the power-lunch scene from a movie, which is very different from our day-to-day writerly existence. But there was no lunch THAT DAY. What clothes we put on didn’t matter because we never left our homes. We each tried to account for those we thought could have been in lower Manhattan, and got calls from friends and family who were concerned for our safety. And we tried to make space in our reality for this incomprehensible event.

After—We were both blessed that none of our immediate loved ones were killed or injured on 9-11, although there were some eerily close calls. But there hasn’t been another of those lunches since, where the memory of THAT DAY hasn’t crossed, however transiently, one or both of our minds. We both try not to schedule meetings or travel on the 11th of September. It still doesn’t feel right. Will that ever go away? Probably. Our worlds don’t stop moving any more on November 22, April 4 or June 5 so eventually the specific date may lose it’s power, but life will still never be the same.

Today, like it was on that 9-11, we are not together—Virginia is at home in New Jersey, Donna in Brooklyn, but we each woke slowly—fully aware of what day it was. We had an ear to the radio (Donna) and an eye on the TV (Virginia) as commentators, reporters, family members, first responders, poised to commemorate, spoke about THAT DAY. But we remember. How can we not? We can all see those towers collapse—and rise only to collapse again and again and again—thanks to the media. Will that ever go away? Will the phantoms of terror—WMD, Osama, Saddam, Iraq ever go away? Or is fear and Homeland Insecurity here to stay? We remember what it was like before Richard Reid totally f__ked up travel for pretty much every human being on the planet. But will taking off your shoes and carrying your toiletries in a baggie become as natural for the next generation as having a telephone in your pocket?

Yes, things change—or look like they have (history is proof that little is different). Time and distance affect perspective. But should we remember for the sake of remembering? Or remember so we do better the next time, instead of the same or worse.

Maybe that’s the question we should ask someone who’s been there—a parent, grandparent, a neighbor or someone who survived Hiroshima, Darfur, Kristallnacht or Trail of Tears...Did we ever get it right—after?

WRITING WHITE?

Crossing Over—Mirror vs Window

When an African American writer or entertainer achieves success with a wider (read White) audience, a la Will Smith or Terry McMillan, they are said to have cross-over appeal. Why isn’t the reverse true? When Blacks watch CSI, Spiderman 3 or pick up the latest John Grisham, no one attributes that to cross-over. Is it assumed that everyone will find these diversions entertaining? That race doesn’t matter as long as it’s White? That Blacks, Mexicans, Chinese, Lakhota Sioux, Lebanese and whomever else the census separates out will “get” the storyline and generate the dollars requisite for success?

Even in the racially diverse “Grey’s Anatomy”, the central character, intern Meredith Grey, is a White woman, despite the fact series writer/producer Shonda Rhimes, is African American. Happenstance or economics? Quiet as it’s kept, in our first novel, Exposures, we “wrote White”, deciding it was the surest way to test our joint writing chops--and get published. It worked; the novel sold in two weeks. It took a lot longer to find a home for our first book with Black characters. At the time we didn’t fit the established categories (we weren’t Toni or Terry), so many editors didn’t believe we would find an audience. They were wrong.

Are these situations silent testimony to the more refined racism that lives with us everyday—the kind of de facto pecking order largely unrecognized by those who perpetuate it, and unchallenged by those of us who are aware, but just grateful to be in the game? Maybe it’s not so silent. The movie “Crash” asks questions about who we are, and what we think about all those other people. There was awkward, knowing laughter in the theater when our not so secret little prejudices were laid bare.

A few months ago, a White reader (one of many who identify themselves that way) emailed to say how much she enjoyed one of our books, but wondered if she was welcome to read our work since she wasn’t Black. We were stunned by the question, but it spoke to the segregated reading habits which are more the norm than we would like to admit. Are we so tired of dealing with each other at work, in the supermarket, on the bus, that it’s a relief to open a book and find people with strange accents and hairdos banished from our fictional world? Or is it more insidious? Are books our mirrors, and we only look for reflections of ourselves?

Shouldn’t reading provide a window to the greater world? We read Anna Karenina without being Russian, The 100 Secret Senses without being Chinese, Catcher in the Rye without being teenaged prep school boys, Shelters of Stone without being Cro-Magnon—Anne Rice without being a vampire. We delight in Carl Hiassen without being Floridians, Sandra Cisneros with no experience of being Latinas from Chicago, understand the plight of a Nigerian girl as told by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, never having set foot in Lagos. Since childhood we have read thousands of books about people who didn’t look like us and found them enlightening, hilarious, heartbreaking, and know, without doubt, we are better people because of it.

Why then is it so surprising when works of fiction, save for “literary” efforts like those of Alice Walker and Edward P. Jones, which mostly recount our collective, tragic, post middle passage history, cross over? Are we to believe that as fully franchised, contemporary Americans living a variety of social, educational, and economic circumstances that our stories are so foreign as to be incomprehensible? That we share no universal human truths?

After the surprise success of Tryin’ to Sleep in the Bed You Made, which featured drawings of two brown-skinned women on the cover, our publisher made a conscious effort to cross over our next book. That cover was dominated by a house flanked by a lush tree. Our three main characters were rendered the size of carpenter ants, their color indistinguishable. So, to appeal to a wider audience we had to lose face? What must we sacrifice to be palatable to the culture at large?

Some bookstores even have separate African American areas. Is this to make us more comfortable in unfamiliar territory? Does this highlight our work, or let other people know they can skip this aisle? Granted, some argue that having a unique section celebrates the Black experience. But are they really separate but unequal niches, a publishing ghetto with very different real estate values?

Until Waiting to Exhale made publishers understand that Black people buy books, we were mostly left outside the gates. Clearly they did not learn in American history that we risked and often lost our lives to learn to read. The Exhale phenomenon is the reason many of us were given a chance. Walter Mosley reached a wider readership thanks to the endorsement of President Clinton. But is it really so hard to throw open our windows and get some fresh air? Browse a bookstore section you usually pass without Oprah to lead the way? If you like Janet Evanovich, try Valerie Wilson-Wesley. Ask a librarian or a co-worker for a recommendation; that’s how many non-Black readers found our work. You might discover a good read on an unexpected shelf—maybe gain insight into someone else, or surprisingly, yourself.

You Never Know What a Day Will Bring

From Donna--

My mom has been heading west for a couple of weeks each Thanksgiving and Spring for 20+ years—to a dude ranch no less, channeling her inner cowgirl. For the last several years, since she retired, she has wintered there—November to May, renting a house and enjoying mild weather and good friends. Asthma and arthritis have made New York winters a problem for her, and I’m glad she found a place that makes her so happy. The rest of the year she lives with my husband and me in Brooklyn.

But the regular pace of her life and mine shifted on April 19th. I was in Filene’s Basement, flipping through the blouse rack, when my cell rang. It was her friend, Katie, telling me in a cracked voice that Mom had been in a terrible car accident—she was broadsided by a pickup truck going 65+mph. When I call up that moment I still get the feeling of floating in a hot, airless bubble. The store noise drained away and I couldn’t breathe, and I struggled to understand what Katie said to me, about the sound like an explosion that sent her running out to the road, about Mom’s car in the ditch and the med-evac helicopter. I strained to make sense of what didn’t make any. The notes I wrote during that call slant erratically across my notebook page in handwriting I would never recognize as mine. During my subway ride home I made mental lists of what I had to do to get myself out there ASAP—book a flight, rent a car, pack some clothes, call my husband and some friends—it kept me together, putting one foot in front of the next, with a purpose. It kept me focused on what I could do instead of what was out of my control.

And it was bad when I arrived the next day. This person whom I had known my whole life to be in her right mind, wasn’t. She recognized me—I could tell because a tear slipped down her face when I entered her ICU room, but there are five days she can’t remember at all, including the accident. Five days of her talking in slurred speech from some reality that wasn’t where the rest of us live, of her being sweetly agitated, pulling out her IV lines, of needing to be reassured that she was injured, not being imprisoned against her will. My heart ached when I came in her room one day and her hands were restrained with cloth cuffs secured to the bed. I’ll spare you the gory details, but she had significant injuries, including a brain bleed, 7 broken ribs and her sternum and an ankle that required plates and pins. After two weeks and some very scary moments—and some funny ones too, where my very reserved and proper mother became the life of the party and social secretary of her semi-private room—she was released to a rehab facility. And the next day she was back in ICU—she had thrown a blood clot to her lung.

For five weeks I left my NY life, and whatever I would have been doing, and tended to her. And I was grateful I could arrange my life so I could do it, without worrying about all that would remain undone until I returned or whether I’d have my job. I was grateful for my husband who held it together at home, for my friends who helped take care of things I would normally have done, and talked to me whenever I needed, and for Mom’s friends, who called regularly and did whatever they could to get both of us through this.

Once I got Mom securely in rehab again, and made sure she was doing well, I came home, with assurances from her friends that they could handle things for a while. And they did. A week and a half ago Mom graduated from rehab to a friend’s guest room, and now she’s finally ready to head home.

She called me Monday. She had received a package of papers I sent which need her attention. Throughout this ordeal I have dealt with wads of forms, insurance companies, the car rental company, health insurance, etc. I have a gallon sized Zip-Lock bag full of statements and reports. But there are a few things that do require her attention and her statement. She was upset after reading through some of the papers, and she said, “I’m glad no one else was hurt, but this would have been simpler if I didn’t make it.” I wanted to come through the phone and yell at her, but I managed to modulate my voice, and I said, “Sometimes life is not easy, but it’s always worth it.” I’m not being Annie, singing about the sun coming out tomorrow. Everybody has had pain, some of it unimaginable to me. There was a hospital aide who would clean Mom’s room. Even when she was assigned elsewhere, she would stop in to check on Mom. After a while, we found out she was from Sierra Leone—she made her way here after the massacre in her town. Her mother was killed, the house set on fire. She had to jump from a window with her little brother on her back—he didn’t make it—unimaginable to me. But now she is pregnant and looking forward to the birth of her child.

All the mistakes, mishaps and the outright pain, are worth the wonder and surprise still to come. I wouldn’t change the bad things that have happened in my life, because it might change the good ones. Mom has always worried about getting things right, about not being a problem. I have too. But I knew something had changed in me since the accident, and I’ve had trouble putting it into words. I still do. But I know it involves, letting loose, becoming keenly aware we all screw up sometimes, and that the world will go on even if the paperwork is a little slow. That sometimes we are all a colossal pain in the face to those who love us, but miraculously, thankfully, they keep loving. That there are people who can get on my final, break the glass, emergency nerve, like Mom sometimes, but I would do anything in this world to keep them safe and happy.

In the midst of it all I was, of course, grateful for the knowledgeable doctors, and most especially the nurses, who were unfailingly kind, gracious, generous, and genuinely concerned for Mom’s well-being, no matter how messy or what time of day or night. But I could also still smile at the roadrunner who darted across my path as I drove through the desert—and the coyote. Seriously—I wasn’t watching the Cartoon Channel. The seemingly endless purple and orange sunsets made me feel serene and truly blessed. And last night, I asked for and received a ride through the aisles of Home Depot on my husband’s lumber cart (maybe a story for another day—involving a carpenter, who is downstairs banging, even as I type, a door and a washing machine) which seemed supremely silly, but it made me giggle and it was just fun.

I’m flying to Arizona to bring Mom home tomorrow. Her return has been a long time coming. So whether your underwear is clean or dirty—and I know Mom’s was clean—you can get hit by a truck. You never know what a day will bring—life changes in unforeseeable seconds. Having that fact smack me up side the head has made it supremely clear to me that I can let go and live.

Who's Counting?!

Birthdays come and birthdays go---and quite obviously, the longer you’re around the more coming and going there is. Today is Virginia’s birthday and let’s just say she’s seen a goodly amount of birthday traffic. But neither of us is of the, “Woes is me. I’m getting older,” school. We have lived each and every one of those years—some great, some awful, but we claim all of them and we’re grateful for the people who have graced us with their presence in our lives.

So we’re celebrating! Dinner and a party at one of our favorite restaurants—not because it’s a special number--round, odd, even, or milestone, but just because every year we’re still around is cause for rejoicing.

We didn’t do that for Donna’s birthday—which was a milestone year—but we were in the throes of writing—a deadline loomed and celebrating wasn’t on our minds or agendas, so we put it off. Shame on us! We shouldn’t (and we won’t) let either of our natal days go unmarked by festivities (cake, champagne, friends is enough—hold the presents) again. There are far too many folks who don’t get another year for those of us who do to take even one of them for granted.

And so tonight we will eat, drink, dance and make merry enough for both of us!