But then November gives way to other holidays and relentless winter and, even in a mild winter like this, I need an extra boost of gratitude come February. Valentine’s Day has always been my favorite holiday (for a while for no other reason than my favorite color is pink, and I look bad in all of the other holidays’ colors–orange, red, green? Yeesh). Since being in Pittsburgh, though, I’ve taken to seeing Valentine’s Day as a pink-coated second chance at Thanksgiving. (Winter is the worst.)

Next week also brings about the beginning of Lent, which, in the Christian tradition, leads up to the greatest sacrifice made in the name of love.  Because this is my blog, and I can make this juxtaposition, my birthday falls toward the beginning of Lent every year, which often leaves me remembering the sacrifices people have made out of love for me, be them my parents or my friends or teachers or clergy or whomever.

For the past several months, I’ve been thinking about how many people in my life don’t have to. Parents and sisters aside, my life is entirely made up of people who don’t have to love me or help me or entertain me or any of that. But they do.

Since I’ve written versions of this post in the past, I’d like to take the time to reflect on what I’m particularly grateful for right now, in this moment.

* My parents, who continue to encourage the series of terrible choices I’m making with regards to some kind of romantic writing career. Also that my dad frequently reminds me when I’m spun in panic that I always land on my feet and get what I need when I need it and that I should have faith in that.

* The Nanny fam, who are the best employers on the planet. They have taken me into their home and trusted me with the girl-child, whom I love. Hanging out with her every day is like hanging out with a high freshman who has just taken intro to philosophy. I pick her up from school, where she’s eating canned mandarin oranges on a hot dog bun (*not what her mother packed for her) and her friends are eating ketchup with a spoon and comparing bellybuttons. But then we’re coloring and talking bells at Temple and compassion and why it doesn’t snow every day or how babies come out of tunnels and it hurts a lot (*my response as to how the baby gets out of the mama’s stomach. Johnny-on-the-spot, I am). I can’t think of a better way to spend my afternoons.

* In the last year, I have made a concerted effort to wander in micro steps away from the back pew that I’ve been duct-taped to for the last three plus years. And now I’ve been rewarded for it with a gaggle of wonderful women and clichés about getting sucked into committees and all of that. And the church kitchen. There will be much to say for so many years about the industrial magical kitchen.

* Finishing grad school means being thrust full-force into the non-school writing community, which, by this point, is filled with must-dos instead of don’t-have-tos/maybes. It also means being excessively grateful for every person who passes on my name or who takes a chance on my work. (It also means being continually grateful for one of the first writing lessons I ever learned and have adhered to ever since—don’t miss a deadline. Also, gather twice as much information as you think you’re going to need and the story writes itself. Invaluable.)

* My friends who are ever-wider flung, but who eventually manage to wrangle me into a phone call or a visit or a series of ridiculous Twitter conversations. This bullet-point could go on the longest and will thus be the shortest, but suffice to say that I have way too many friends who make a far greater effort than I do, and they usually do so when I need them to do so most.

* Teaching is brand new in the past year after a decade alternating between wanting it and not wanting it and trying to decide which age/grade/type of teaching I could possibly want. Being able to explore teaching creative writing at the undergraduate level at two different institutions has been amazing. I have some crazy talented students, many very patient students who laugh at my awkward jokes and tolerate that Joan Didion is the only author to show up twice in the semester. That’s right–between two classes this semester, I have worked in four Joan Didion days. How could I not be grateful for that? (Thanks, self.)

Happy Valentine’s Day, y’all!

(If you insist: spew in this.)

While ignoring things of a more pressing nature, I clicked my way through my entertainment Google Reader.  (Yes, more than one Google Reader account.  Don’t judge.)  Since most stories between E!, People, and US Weekly repeat, the click process usually goes pretty quickly; the headline “Ashley Tisdale Cracks Things Up in Her New Video” did catch my eye, mostly because I never remember who Ashley Tisdale is.  So sayeth E!:

Sure enough, in this new video for her latest single, “Crank It Up,” Ash clearly can’t wait to get to the club. We see her practicing some sexy moves, seductive looks and various hand-to-hair gestures after watching, we assume, several Britney Spears videos.

Well!  With a description like that, how do I not give it a peek?

Somehow all of the action E! describes isn’t actually present in the video.  There’s something too slow in Tisdale’s actions (and more hair play than a junior high dance), like she didn’t get the memo that a song of this pace/beat would require, I don’t know, actually moving, rather than something that looks vaguely like yoga in her bedroom?

The song itself is catchy in a way I couldn’t quite place at first.  I’ve been having this feeling with Top 40 a great deal lately, in that songs cranking their way out of production keep sounding like the tunes I heard on Z104 back in middle school.  (A station that, depending on the day, sadly/gladly no longer exists.)

Oh, middle school, I thought as the association came once again.  It was only a quick beat from there that I remembered Mariah Carey has some new songs circulating the airwaves.

(Fun fact: the first song I danced to with a boy was Mariah Carey’s “Always Be My Baby.”  Seventh grade after-school dance.  I wore white shorts overalls and a long sleeve sky blue shirt.  The boy had big ears and played golf.  Maintaining space to remember this is why I never learned algebra.)

Now, I’m not entirely sure what Mariah Carey’s tunes have sounded like since Daydream (with the exception of her duet with Whitney Houston for The Prince of Egypt soundtrack).  Wikipedia tells me that Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel isn’t selling as well as last year’s E=MC².  But I took a wander over to YouTube anyway to check out her most recent single, “H.A.T.E.U.”  (Uh, is there some kind of poetic meaning behind the formatting of this title?  Does e.e. need to bust up on this mess?)

“H.A.T.E.U.” sounds like something that Glenn Hollis would have played on 97.1 WASH-FM’s After Hours program.  Which means it sounds exactly like something Mariah Carey would have made in her Daydream days when people called into the radio station for love songs and dedications.  (Side note: apparently, Hollis is back on the air playing smooth jazz?)  This causes a tremendously righteous flashback of Glenn Hollis’s comforting voice as I fell asleep at night, listening to the same handful of love songs and sad sap dedications.

You know where that takes me, right?

Whitney Houston.

(“You know, someone like you needs to diminish their criminal impulses, not magnify them.”)

I most assuredly am a product of The Bodyguard soundtrack.  I mean, it was 1992, and I was a nine-year-old girl who listened to the soft rock/adult contemporary radio station.  How could I avoid it?  I would bet the paycheck that my school recently lost that Glenn Hollis played Whitney Houston every single night.

So I’m not sure I’ve heard anything by Houston since the aforementioned Mariah Carey duet.  Damn if she doesn’t start “Million Dollar Bill” with the kind of elongated note that made her famous in the first place.  (Something Carey mastered as well once upon a time, but I’m not hearing it so much this time around.)  Between the two of them, can we please have a revival of early/mid-‘90s music?

No, I’m serious.  These songs make me want to grab my magenta and purple 12-speed and haul ass to the pool, play ping-pong for Slurpees at 7-11, pester the lifeguards, and tan my way through puberty.  Also, I would really like to fall asleep tonight to After Hours.

Pop quiz: I only had enough money on iTunes to download one song.  Which one?

“You know I’ve been Presbyterian for like a minute and a half, right?” I asked my confirmand and my pastor and have said to everyone who’s been on the receiving end of this story.

No one seems to mind this fact, and so on we go, exploring the denomination, larger Christianity, faith in general and other Big Questions.

You know what’s really hard about that? No. Scratch that. You know what’s really easy about that? Being glib. It’s really easy to turn the whole thing into some big chucklefest. It’s really easy to brush the whole thing aside with a dusting of “you know, God, or whatever.”

What’s hard is being sincere. Not even in answering the questions, but in asking them in the first place.

I live in a world of academics and writers, many—but not all—of whom are decidedly not religious. And, you know, what I’m about to say probably isn’t even about religion, not really. It’s probably more about spending too much with the deconstructionalists and the years of reading books that have no author, no reader, and no text. It’s more about talking about what’s problematic than what is magnificent.

First: I love things. I unabashedly love a great many things. Virginia Woolf, TV, Sweet Valley High, Joan Didion, the mall, whatever my daily new favorite thing is. I do a weird jazz hand flutter to go with the high-pitched voice. I talk about my favorite things ad nauseum.

But you know what I don’t do? I never talk about what really matters. I never allow anything to get assigned actual value in the public sphere. Maybe it’s because assigned value eventually skis the slippery slope down to marginalization and oppression. Maybe it’s because TV taught me to be too cool for anything to have meaning. Maybe because books taught me that all the good stuff is left unsaid.

Being sincere is hard. Always. Being sincere means being vulnerable. And to be sincere about faith, about religion, about God, is the most vulnerable I can imagine being, since faith, religion, and God are something I consider more personal than anything else in my life.

Even talking about writing is less personal. Talking about writing is often cynical. Forget the market or readers or digital forms or the academy or any of that. Think about the act of writing itself.

Writers talk about writing all the time. They talk about it with each other and they talk about it online and they blog about it and it fills a majority of air space in the classroom. Writers talk about the problems they are having or the ideas that they have or wish they had, the books that they’ve read and that have inspired them. They talk about habits formed, habits broken, habits desired. Write every day. Write when you feel like it. Write in the morning, first thing. Write late at night, last thing.

Writing is hard. Always. It’s so hard. Characters never do what you want them to do, dialogue always sounds forced, the exposition is always a sinkhole. Sources don’t call back, facts don’t add up, it’s all situation and no story. The Internet is full of distractions, coffee shops are full of poseurs, desk chairs are woefully uncomfortable. (Full disclosure: I hate my desk chair. I spend more time during the day rearranging myself in it than anything else.) And the bottom line question, always: so what?

So what? So what? So what?

Writing is hard.

And it’s all true. All of it. (Sorry, coffee shop people, of which I am one on occasion–and a poseur always.)

But you know what? I love to write. I do. I really, really love it. Sincerely. I love learning new things and talking to new people and sitting down and making the puzzle come together and untangling knots and mixing metaphors with great aplomb. I love when things really get going and I forget that I’ve had to pee for the last hour and my sternum makes weird noises when I finally stop hunching over the keyboard. I love that I forget I possess a cat.

(See, even in a blog entry about sincerity, I can’t be completely sincere.)

And you know what else? I don’t think, in the nine years I spent as a student in higher ed, I ever once said those things—aloud—to other people. I don’t think, in being Presbyterian for a minute and a half and a life-long Christian whose first memory is of standing in my crib while my grandma teaches me the sign of the cross, I ever once said—aloud—to other people what I actually live by. I don’t think I’ve ever said, with sincerity, just what I mean when I say I have faith, am religious, believe in God.

Because who wants to be seen being sincerely, vulnerably enthusiastic about God?

On my cube walls, I have a few of those Tumblr-decorated quotations. You know, where words are different sizes and put together in a casually artful way. My favorite is by the inimitable John Green:

…because nerds like us are allowed to be unironically enthusiastic about stuff… Nerds are allowed to love stuff, like jump-up-and-down-in-the-chair-can’t-control-yourself love it. Hank, when people call people nerds, mostly what they’re saying is ‘you like stuff.’ Which is just not a good insult at all. Like, ‘you are too enthusiastic about the miracle of human consciousness’.

May we all live this—really.

I didn’t love Blue Nights immediately upon reading it.

This may come as a complete and total surprise to anyone who has listened to me talk ever. I have been stupid in love with Joan Didion’s writing since I was seventeen and first read “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” When we read said essay last month in the class I teach, I declared it Happy Joan Didion Day and told my students they would never again experience such a good day.

Let’s put it this way: while my tattoos and my cat are all out of Virginia Woolf books, I did, in fact, dress in homage to “On Keeping a Notebook” for both my first and last class as an MFA student because I have also loved that essay since I was seventeen and wearing the plaid [cotton] dress seemed in keeping with the general neuroses related to both.

What I don’t think I’ve ever talked about is how I read.

I am a terrible first reader.

To say that I read everything the Internet had to say about Blue Nights in the weeks leading up to the book’s release would not be overstatement. And to know that I’ve read everything the Internet had to say about Blue Nights in the weeks leading up to the book’s release means that I read the same quotable passages and the same ponderings on the major themes and the same doubts about the book’s insularity.

And, in actually reading Blue Nights, in one day, into the hours far past my bedtime, I know that the book’s been rushed. By them, by me. Because how do you not wildly consume Didion (especially if you’ve got a review deadline)?

In “A Veil of Words,” Jeanette Winterson writes of people’s difficulties with Woolf’s novel The Waves. She says, “The pace of Woolf’s writing is carefully measured. In The Waves the pace is slow. This is not a defect. Nobody would expect to play a piece of music at twice the speed of the score and be able to enjoy it. Yet, in literature this is happening all the time.” (Her advice on how to go about reading The Waves is invaluable and could ultimately change your mind about the book if you were so inclined to hate it by page two and would not like to try again.)

I am a terrible first reader because I’m a rushed first reader. I hate not understanding my boundaries. I don’t like not knowing what lies ahead, how the book or story or movie takes its rough shape. I don’t know how to make my thoughts happen if I don’t know what all of my thoughts are supposed to be. Especially with a book as hyped as Blue Nights, a first reading is not much more than a semi-subconscious attempt to find all of those aforementioned quotable passages, ponderings, and doubts. It’s not unlike seeing a movie in the theater with the trailer fresh in your mind. Where does that fit in? And that?

It’s a horrible, non-contextualized mess.

The blue nights to which Didion weaves her thoughts are among my most anxiety-ridden. I spend them thinking, Get it over with. Go on, be night already. (That I don’t do well with lingering transitions would be an understatement times ten.) That same rushed resentment I feel during those evenings is the same feeling that always accompanies a first reading, especially for a book with any sort of poetic leanings whatsoever.

Like The Waves, Blue Nights (and, before it, The Year of Magical Thinking) are books of pacing. There’s no real plot, not one we don’t already know from articles and interviews and living in a literary world. They’re all books of repeated images and phrases that mean little if not savored in time with the author’s intentions. They’re all books that benefit from multiple readings because their images and phrases become symphonic in their vast interconnectivity and there’s just no way for [me] to fully live that in fewer than a half dozen readings. Because, the first time, I read thinking, Go on, be night already.

But, in the first read, there are pings. There are, of course, the quotable passages (that will need immense distance in both time and space to become as meaningful as they ought to be, but over-use has already made them as itchy as a Top 40 song). But there are the other, more personal moments. The sentence I underline for myself (the sentence I underline for myself being the very first reason I don’t often lend my books to people). There are movements appreciable mostly only to writers (those, too, underlined, although with less apprehension of the passing glance).

Though it’s been noted that Blue Nights is a veritable who’s who of a generation of a certain brand of celebrity, it’s also, especially when paired with The Year of Magical Thinking, a veritable Easter egg hunt of Didion’s previous work. I could very gladly go through both books and for so many of the anecdotes write in the margin the corresponding essay from Didion’s oeuvre. And it’s because of those things, the pings and the eggs, that I know I will someday love Blue Nights with the same boundless enthusiasm that arises every time I see Joan Didion in print.

I’m wary about discussing TV in comparison to real life because that’s not the point (ditto most entertainment; do you think people were sitting around a campfire thousands of years ago complaining of the problematic representations in The Odyssey?). But while I don’t go looking for it, and realism isn’t the bar by which I measure success, I am constantly taken when television does offer a real part of life in excruciatingly accurate detail.

One of the major criticisms of Nurse Jackie is that protagonist Jackie Peyton never suffers consequences. She lies, steals, cheats – hits every mark of addiction – and continues to sail as the ironclad head nurse. Some of that has changed as the third season draws to a close; she, for instance, is banned from administering narcotics. On one level, I get that criticism. After three seasons of an ill begotten and otherwise filched pill collection, an administrative pause is way too little way too late. And this is not just television, but American television. We have no ability to watch deviant behavior that doesn’t come with an immediate harsh backlash.

At first, I wanted to offer that, ultimately, Jackie has been experiencing slow-boil consequences since season one as her now-eleven-year-old daughter Grace grapples with anxiety issues. When the subject first arises from Grace’s teacher in season one, Jackie explodes. To deal with Grace’s severe anxiety would mean addressing her own, and since Jackie doesn’t exactly deal with her problems, she’s not about to admit that her daughter has any, either. So not only does Grace continue to suffer, but she’ll continue growing in her suffering in such a way that – eventually, inevitably – Jackie will have to deal on a level that far surpasses the effort she would have had to make if she had acted immediately.

I stand by that argument, especially now as Grace embarks on a tour de Xanax. Especially because Jackie is what happens when no one wants to deal with your problems, least of all you. We like to think, especially in our entertainment, that, say, doing drugs ends in death on the first try. (Thanks, Francine Pascal.) But we all know it usually doesn’t. We all know – have that friend, have been that friend – that uses undetected until she’s hollow-eyed. The friend who purges undetected until we accidentally stumble upon her in the bathroom. The friend whose depression goes untreated, whose anxiety goes untreated, on and on and on.

During last week’s “F*ck the Lemurs,” administrative powerhouse Mrs. Akalitus lets on, without ever saying so, just how long she’s known that Jackie has a drug problem. We know that she’s let the issue slide because Jackie’s superior work as a nurse remains untainted by her use. Never mind how much Jackie has been hurting herself. It’s just that sometimes it’s easier not to talk about it, you know?

Or, as Dr. O’Hara said, “I don’t talk about it because I don’t like talking about it. And I know full well that if I did start talking about it you’d go so far underground that no one would hear your cry for help, if in fact one day you need it.”

Eve Best’s O’Hara has been nothing short of magnificent as this storyline has surfaced. (Okay, for serious, she’s always amazing, but even more so right now.) She’s Jackie’s best friend. And, as a best friend, what are you supposed to do? You can say something. Maybe you do. Maybe you don’t. But it’s not something you can bring up every day. It’s not something you can harp on without end. As a friend, a parent, a sibling, a child, whatever, sometimes the best you can do by somebody you love is to just exist. To go to lunch. To talk in the chapel. To laugh over the silly things. But you know. And she knows. And it’s in that space you have to exist until she makes that next step.

In yesterday’s “Batting Practice,” Jackie admits to putting an end to her recent (and short-lived) sobriety by downing Grace’s Xanax. O’Hara doesn’t yell. She doesn’t scold. She just looks…crushed. All she can do is whisper Jackie’s name because what else can you do when you hope so hard for something that’s never going to happen?

O’Hara, who is something of a British lovechild of ER’s Drs. Romano and Weaver, doesn’t come easily to tears. She doesn’t fall to expressed emotion in general. She drinks, she spends money, she can avoid as well as Jackie can. In her final scene of the episode, she has a big Barneys’ shopping bag in view behind her desk, which Jackie notes upon entering O’Hara’s office. After giving Jackie a refill on Grace’s medication, O’Hara looks down at her desk and, without the show calling attention to it, brushes her fingers underneath one eye. She looks away, clears her throat, before listing the many ways she could truly help Jackie out of her addiction. Rehab, meetings, detox somewhere far away. Or, in her final offer, personal detox, O’Hara as “a very fancy methadone clinic.”  “You are in over your head,” she says. “I just want everything to be” – she pauses – “better.”

This pain, this intensity, this serious-problem-not-solved-in-twenty-two-minutes (thanks, DJ’s anorexia on Full House) is so much more satisfying for me as a viewer than the catch and release of television’s traditional format. (It’s, actually, an extension of what I really loved about Roseanne, but that’s for another day.) Odysseus eventually made it home, and Jackie will, too.

Coming soon — I finally dry my tears over the end of Brothers and Sisters (for now, anyway), Nurse Jackie (and possibly Nancy Botwin) are facing consequences that aren’t talked about by people who say both Nurse Jackie and Weeds are without consequences, and thoughts on the season finale of Parks and Rec.

Happy day, y’all!

A regular review would rather misguided given Tina Fey’s top-five status in my life (and, let’s be honest, I’m still trying to keep in line for the future position of being her wife).

Here’s what you need to know: buy the book. Now. I know it’s hardback. Be a sport and support the cause, okay? It’s great, she’s great, etc. Don’t drink / eat with the book in your hands because then you just paid hardback money to foul up the pages on the first read. Seriously, seriously funny stuff. Which should be eight thousand shades of obvious.

What I need to talk about is this: there’s this quiet little moment toward the end of the book in the midst of a larger section about Sarah Palin. The section has much of what you’d expect (which doesn’t mean it should have gone unsaid because it definitely needs to be said) about gender and politics and comedy. Fey is deepened as a character in both her conflict about having Palin on Saturday Night Live as well as how she relates to Palin once they are face to face, etc. At the beginning of the section, when Fey first grapples with whether or not to play Palin on the show, she’s also in the midst of trying to secure and film Oprah for 30 Rock as well as properly plan her daughter’s birthday party. The latter thread is both humorous as well as touching. On the surface, it looks kind of silly to be fretting about Peter Pan plates while trying to convince Oprah to make an appearance on your show and whether or not to take on an impression of a vice presidential candidate. But, you know, really it’s not. Not when you think about it. The whole bit could have stopped there, and I would have applauded Fey for a move both bold and telling.

But, dammit, she’s Tina Fey, so of course she’s not going to stop there.

One of the best parts of all this is that my daughter may actually have childhood memories of going to SNL. I left so soon after she was born, I didn’t think she would know that place or those people, but now she will, which means a lot to me because that was my home for a long time.

Whoa. Wow.

In the magnificent series finale of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Mary looks around the group huddle and says this:

But last night, I thought, what is a family anyway? They’re just people who make you feel less alone and really loved. And that’s what you’ve done for me. Thank you for being my family.

That’s the big thing, right? The big female question. Work or family? (I suppose men can have that question, too, but I sometimes forget to be an equal-opportunity-gender-examiner.) There have been a whole slew of sitcoms beginning in the ‘70s about work as family. And we joke all the time, don’t we, about work spouses and the like. And that’s just in roughly forty-hour-a-week jobs. Imagine working at a place like Saturday Night Live, which, from what I’ve read, can very often be your entire life.

Imagine that our beloved Mary Richards is our beloved Liz Lemon. Mary Richards is thirty-seven when she turns off the WJM newsroom lights. Thirty-seven is nothing in current childbearing years. Say she walked out of that room, meets the man of her dreams or the moment, and several years down the line is holding her child’s hand as they pass by the building that housed so much of her formative Minneapolis years. Can you tell the story of Mary Richards without telling the story of Lou or Murray or Ted or Sue Ann? Rhoda and Phyllis – they’re the friends you expect. But the rest – you don’t have Mary Richards without the rest.

How do you not want your child to know that part of you? I remember being four(ish) and holding my dad’s hand on the Virginia Tech campus as he and my mom told me and my sister about what their lives had been like in college (or, I suppose, the preschool-edit of what their lives had been like in college). I grew up to my grandpa’s stories of boyhood in Italy and, later, Pennsylvania. I feel blessed that I can drive the half an hour to Vandergrift and wander its crooked streets, and I look forward to a day when I have the kind of money that will allow me to roam the Italian village.

But we don’t really talk about work that way. I mean, I guess we do in a take-your-daughter-to-work-day kind of way, but not in the that-was-my-home-for-a-long-time kind of way. But when you make the decision or follow that path or whatever that leads to the kind of life where work is home and work is family, how do you pass that on when you later find yourself on a different path?

Tina Fey can be brilliant and witty and say all the right things at all the right times (can…I mean, is and does), but in no other place does she so perfectly share not the debate itself, but its larger complexity. And in such an understated and unassuming way, especially in such a larger and louder context.

As I seem to be steadily embarking on a Mary Richard / Liz Lemon path to life, it’s comforting to know not that my future isn’t either / or (which I already know), but that the before can still mean so much in the after.

It’s been a big week for books in my life, and reading Confidential directly after Unfamiliar Fishes led me to one thought: I have more questions about the last ten years in Sweet Valley than I do the entirety of the complex and morally ambiguous history of America’s annexation of Hawaii.

If you know anything about me, you know my relentless love of and devotion to the world of Sweet Valley. I’ve been waiting for this book for forever. Though Sweet Valley Confidential is not the fabled series restart – it’s a singular entity – it’s about as satisfying and dissatisfying as any other individual Sweet Valley book. This book, however, is a real-sized, hard-backed serious mess. And, with the exception of the inevitable reconciliation scene, is so tremendously awful that it’s amazing again. (The reconciliation scene is just tremendously awful period.)

Premise: the twins are twenty-seven years old, maybe certifiable grownups. They are also estranged, Jessica having done yet another unforgivable misdeed, only this one has led to Elizabeth’s flight for New York City, where she learns to wear black and have casual sex. (Good for her.) Notably, there is no mention of the similar misdeed that led to a similar flight to London (incidentally, where Elizabeth lost her museum-quality virginity) while the twins were in college.

But this one is bigger. Why? Jessica is with Todd.

Well, okay, I’ll bite.

First, when did Elizabeth get back together with Todd? Francine gives us nothing about that. Second, they were living together for two years and only starting to plan their wedding. Really, Francine? This is Elizabeth’s storybook high school romance. I don’t for a millisecond believe that she wouldn’t have insisted that shit get locked down before cohabitation. I do, however, absolutely believe that Jessica’s engagement to Todd is her foray into marriage number three.

Here’s how it went down: Jessica and Todd have a dalliance their senior year of undergrad (at which point, he’s already back together with Elizabeth). This leads to their insistence that they hate each other as well as Jessica’s marrying a much older and wealthier man (so she can flee the country or something. She leaves said husband while on his yacht in European waters). She comes back and moves in with Todd and Elizabeth, and the sexual tension is insurmountable (yuk, yuk, yuk). Blah, blah, blah, Elizabeth finds out, bolts, Jessica and Todd immediately move in together and become engaged, etc. All of this happens in first-person flashbacks. The real-time plot is Jessica trying to win back Elizabeth (lots of creepy sexual undertones between the twins in this book) and Elizabeth trying to be someone other than Elizabeth, all of which ends, of course, in Jessica and Todd’s wedding.

More noteworthy things:

• Actually, first, I want to note something genuinely positive about this book. That Sweet Valley is – at heart – a small town filled with people who will never give up being big fish in a small pond is a centerpiece of Confidential. And it’s here that Francine allows life to actually happen to these people. For instance, Caroline Pearce is a cancer-surviving real estate agent who has nothing better to do than remain the gossip she was in high school. The group intermarries…and cheats…and divorces…and moves in together at lesbian-like speeds…in a style that’s uncannily un-Sweet Valley, yet somehow remotely true to a character’s likely trajectory.
• Elizabeth uses words like fuck and shithead and I just can’t deal with that.
• Steven Wakefield, playboy esquire, gets caught with Aaron Dallas. He leaves his baking-her-feelings wife Cara for him. The family-acceptance flashback is skipped entirely. That’s cheating on your part, Francine.
• Lila and Ken were married/are separating. She’s a cheater. He’s an NFL player. Obv.
• Winston made a lot of money, turned into a douche, and died. That’s upsetting to say the least.
• Grandma Marjorie exists. And we actually get to see her!
• Enid is a recovering-alcoholic, right-wing gynecologist. We don’t get to see her at all. Yet somehow she’s at the wedding. As is Mr. Collins. And many other people who have no business being there like Jeffrey French, Betsey Martin, Roger Patman (I thought he died in the earthquake??), and Robin Wilson. And, in case you were worried, Robin Wilson has only gained back a little bit of weight while being the town’s premier caterer. Cheap shots, Francine, but it is pretty much the best epilogue of any book ever, so you get a half-pass.
• Bruce Patman’s parents died while he was in college, turning him into an actual human being as well as Elizabeth’s best friend. In the eighteen years I’ve been reading Sweet Valley books, I never once thought I’d root for Bruce, yet I did every step of the way in Confidential. Though, I’d like to note, no mention of Bruce’s dad and Alice in their college days. Double note: Bruce’s moment with Elizabeth in high school is brushed over like nbd.
• Have you felt like puking today? Try on this post-love-confession between Bruce and Elizabeth: “Gently, he unbuttoned her silk blouse. She didn’t move. He slid it down over her shoulders, deftly unhooking her bra and allowing her breasts, with their taut nipples, to be free. He just started at her, drinking in the sight of the flesh and blood of years of longing. Still she didn’t move, waiting for him to slip her skirt and thong down over her hips and reveal her total nakedness to him.”

Lastly, I leave you with the three best passages in the entire Sweet Valley universe, two of which prove once and for all what a true badass Alice Wakefield is.

• Between Alice and Jessica: “‘That’s the only reason I’m doing it, because you’re making me,’ said the twenty-seven/thirteen-year-old. ‘I don’t know what Todd is going to do.’ ‘Act like a man, I hope.’”
• When everyone combusts at Grandma Marjorie’s birthday party: “‘Ned!’ [Alice] shouted. ‘Bring out the fucking cake!’”
• From the epilogue, which says everything I ever hoped Francine would ever say: “It was a fun wedding. Not a whole lot different from any Sweet Valley High dance, which, as everyone knows, is not a whole lot different from real life.” (I want this to be my tombstone. Now that the Internet is aware of this, it better happen.)

Last spring, I took Cathy Day’s fiction workshop.  Have we talked about how much I love Cathy Day?  (And that she’s totally a two-name person at all times?)  I had taken a short forms fiction readings class with her the semester before and sweet talked her into being my thesis chair.

To which she asked, “Are you writing a thesis or a book?”

Oh.

Well.

I don’t know.  By program design, we’re all supposed to be writing books.  Especially in nonfiction where people were encouraged to write narrative nonfiction with the fringes opting for memoir and some (this girl) writing essays in order to meet the two-hundred-page manuscript requirement.  People walk around the fifth floor of the Cathedral talking about my book. (More on this later.)

But are we writing something that meets the thesis requirements and will most likely be forever condemned to the box marked What $60,000 in debt buys you?  Or are we using our time and our efforts toward the hazy horizon of the publishing industry?

So I said, “Thesis? Question mark?” because I really wasn’t sure what to say.

Fast forward to January.  Workshop time.  Time, we are told, to work on our Big Thing.

First, thank goodness for the Big Thing.  Because manuscript sounds weird, thesis sounds like not enough for how much we’re expected to write (though I still continue to use it), and my book sounds presumptuous in ways that rarely please the fates.  The deal – as Cathy writes about in this incredible essay – is basically that we weren’t in there to write short stories (unless, you know, you actually wanted to).  Snippets of Big Thing, chapters or large portions of Big Thing.  You could have two little workshops or one big workshop to meet your fifty-page requirement for the semester.

A glimpse of what actually winds up happening in nonfiction workshops where we all workshop our manuscripts (ha, there’s another one of those words! Also, it’s my understanding that fiction students frequently workshop short stories for journal publication while working on their novels on their own time): confusion.  Nonfiction workshop is so often confusion.  The same semester as Cathy’s class, I also took nonfiction workshop, and I watched my friend try again to make something happen with her memoir only to be told to do the things she had been told not to do the previous year.  She, to say the least, was not thrilled.  And, really, twenty pages out of context isn’t enough to get the feedback you really need.

And then Cathy’s class.  We kept a class blog where each of us posted our project proposal and charted our progress and our process.  This alone was great.  And then I got to see how it went over to get fifty pages of a classmate’s work in a classroom setting.

You may or may not know that I’m president of the Julie Draper Fan Club.  This happened as a direct result of Cathy’s workshop.  Because we got fifty pages of Julie’s sweeping Southern novel, and I was In Love.  We’re talking a level of investment in a classmate’s work that usually takes semesters to acquire.  There’s such a huge difference in what you can feel as a reader in twenty workshop pages and fifty workshop pages.  And, sure, there are still problems with workshop regardless of number of pages, but that’s another discussion entirely.

And then there was the Big Thing about the Big Thing.  As with most workshops I’ve taken, there was reading to be done.  But because we were focused on the Big Thing, instead of the Little Thing, we were each asked to read a book and then take it apart.  You know, like you’ve done eight million times for short stories and other Little Things.  The book was our choosing – something that would help us figure out our own Big Thing.

What happened: Julie Draper finally explained Absalom, Absalom! so that I finally understood what the hell was happening.

Good for you, Julie.

The rest of us were not so ambitious.  (Short of something by Joyce, I’m not really sure what could be more ambitious than Faulkner.)

Because I’m working on a collection of essays and because I have a creepy obsession with Sarah Vowell, I took apart The Partly Cloudy Patriot.  Maybe you’ve seen me color essays/chapters of books/etc.  (It’s fun to be in class with me.)  I did, in fact, consider coloring the entirety of the book, but I don’t have that kind of time on my hands (though it would be a worthwhile future exercise).  Instead, I cut out sections of colored scrapbook paper to represent what I might color on the page.  Themes, tone, etc.  I cut them according to approximate proportion in each essay, and each essay in proportion to the book.  It was intense.

And the little creaky gears in the back of my head went click.

Oh.  The difference between a thesis and a book.

I had plans for ten twenty-page essays.  Workshop length essays.  Because that’s what you write, right?  But a book!  You guys, do you know what happens in a book of essays?  Ten-page essays.  Thirty-page essays.  A three-page essay containing nothing but quirky tidbits about the Pittsburgh airport and The Great Gatsby.  Little essays that reflect on bigger essays.  Funny essays, sad essays.

There are so many things I want to write about that I really don’t want to write about/don’t really have enough to say for twenty pages.  Lifetime movies. Series finales.  Sex and the City.

Boom.  Restructure.  Anchor essays.  Essays that move themes along.  Big Center Essays.  Lists both annotated and standalone.  Energy! Enthusiasm! Creation of the Cathy Day Fan Club, Pittsburgh chapter.

The semester ended.  I turned in a complete draft of my Big Thing.

A few weeks later, I got the two hundred pages back from Cathy.  Scribbled near the front: “I think you’re writing a book.”