I’ve been doing a bunch of interviews for Forest for the Trees 2.O. I’ve been “upbeat.” I don’t even recognize myself. That’s an exaggeration. I recognize some part of myself, the part of myself that has been a cheerleader for writers for 25 years. But who is she?

There are days when I can’t even begin to fathom how people get dressed, one foot in their underpants, then the other. When the sight of an adult lunch box could make me weep. I watch a woman on the train apply a full face of make-up. I have complete contempt for her but I can’t stop watching. What are we, Cleopatra? Do you ever think how fun it is to drive? Do you ever think that writing can have you? Can you believe some people wear uniforms? Badges! Do I need to tweet? Am I on Facebook? How many hits do you get on your blog? How many hits do you get on your fucking blog? I’ll fuck you up. I’ll fuck you up. So much has changed in ten years. Consider this: blah blah blah. When do I find time to write? When do I find time to pick my face? When do I find time to read one poem over and over and never get it? And never want to. Briefcases are so sad. Buckles. Rubbers. An inscription in a book you buy in a second-hand store.

What have you lost?

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I went to Blue State today, a local coffee swillery, to get some reading done. It was packed and I shared a table with a young man who kindly gestured for me to sit when he noticed my stunned where-am-I-going-to-sit-in-the-cafeteria look. Just a page into my manuscript, he asked me if I was reading a manuscript. Yes. Then, politely, he asked if I would tell him what I was writing. I explained that I worked with writers, that the manuscript belonged to a client. He wanted to know what it was about. I told him. I started reading again. He returned to highlighting his own notes in a wide, unlined notebook.

May I disturb you again, he asked. Is there any other purpose to reading beyond  information or entertainment? I think so, I said. Such as, he asked.  Consolation, identification, understanding, I said, for communicating.  Do think there’s anything wrong with playing hundreds of hours of video games, he asked. I said I wasn’t sure. Pinball was my game freshman year. But that’s just reflexes,  he said, these games are whole worlds, and then he said something about an avatar. I thought he was a lonely freshman, but it turns out he was a lonely first year architecture student from Canada.

I remember spending hours in cafes when I was an undergraduate. I don’ think I ever spoke to anyone. I didn’t need to, armed with my notebook, Rimbaud, and Marlboro Lights. What about you? Cafe time? And, just for the hell of it, where do you stand on Starbucks?  We’ve known each other long enough; I want to know what you drink, if you drink, and if you ever wrote anything at a Starbucks worth reading. I’m extremely happy they didn’t exist when I needed to brood full-time.

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I am what I am

Yesterday, I was at the gym reading about Kelsey Grammer’s divorce from his wife of 14 years. Kelsey, according to his ex-Camille, was going to New York to prepare for his role in La Cage Aux Folles (a production I saw!?!). She wanted to go with him, but he begged off explaining that the rehearsal schedule would be arduous, he’d never see her or the kids. Okay, she stayed in LA. Of course, you know where this is going. He embarks on a new relationship. (Yes, a flight attendant but so fucking what.) Camille finds out from a friend. And this is where my heart nearly stopped and not from my exertion on the tread mill. She called him to ask if it were true. She begged him to give their relationship another chance. She wept. What about the kids, the years together. According to her account he replied thus: Grow up.

When my husband worked for a major trade publisher, he asked for a raise and was denied. Then, he was offered a job by another publisher, nearly doubling his salary. When he went back to his employer with the news of the offer, she immediately matched it. He asked her where the money was just weeks ago when he wanted a raise. She said, Grow up.

What does it really mean, grow up? Does it mean stop pretending you don’t get what is happening? Does it mean I am far superior to you, child. Does it mean give up your foolish dreams? Does it cut to the chase? Or destroy it? What the fuck am I writing about? I realize I could apply those two words to about ten situations I’m in right now and I would feel chastened because all the angst and misery that pretends to be cloaked in some kind of confusion is bullshit. Grow Up!

Two questions: what the fuck is this post about?  Second: is there anyone you would like to tell to grow up and why (apart from me because this, after all,  is my sandbox).

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Janet Reid’s got a great contest running on her fantastic  blog and the winner gets, yes you guessed it, a copy of the revised and updated FOREST FOR THE TREES. You can’t win if you don’t play. Have a great weekend, Betsy

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My husband sold his first novel last month. When we were just out of college, we’d meet on Friday nights, go for dinner at the Second Avenue Deli, go to the St. Marks Poetry Workshop, and then spend hours at the Cloisters Cafe talking poetry, love, life. I smoked Marlboro Lights. He smoked Parliaments. We didn’t become romantically involved until much later, but we cemented a friendship that was fueled in part by a belief in the other as a writer. Neither of us chose the path of a writer’s life. We’ve both worked full time in publishing for more than 25 years and have done all our writing on weekends, nights, or pre-dawn. When we had our daughter, we spelled each other for long weekend days so the other could write. We understood the desire to be alone. It’s more than a desire. It’s a necessity, an imperative.

How much time do you spend alone, need to spend alone? Is there someone in your life you believes in you as a writer? How are we all going to find the boat and row home?

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How are you supposed to behave when a good friend becomes a famous writer? When she invites you to a reading and you feel the urge to rush out the moment she heads back to her seat, but you can’t figure out how to exit? What are you supposed to do, wave at her across the room as you lope outside for air?

I don’t love her stories or novels, mind you, but to be fair I can only read them with one eye open. We’d known each other since college and sent long letters at Christmas for 25 years after that, full of funny, self-deprecating descriptions of our lives. And we always remembered each others’  birthdays. Then she stopped responding to my cards, so I stopped sending them. Was it her rejection or her success that turned my feelings of friendship to schadenfreude?

I seethed in jealousy. I swam in it. I lost hours on the Internet reading fawning praise of her talent, brightening at the occasional blunt criticism.

What, I wonder, has it been like to have the huge advances and the fat royalty checks, the prize money and the invitations to speak at packed auditoriums? Surely her intention wasn’t to torture me and make me feel invisible, but she has managed to do that nonetheless.

She and I shared an apartment in New York for a year after college. For her birthday that year, her parents gave her two tickets to the ballet, and she invited me. We watched an exhilarating performance: the magic of Baryshnikov from fourth-row seats. Leaving Lincoln Center for the subway, we got separated in the throng, and I arrived on the platform just in time to see the subway doors close with my friend inside. We stared at each other for a moment in mute shock, then I watched her move away from me, slowly at first, then faster and farther, until no one would have been able to tell we’d started out together.

How do you manage to nurture, quell, or otherwise live with your envy and schadenfreude when someone you know catapults to literary stardom?

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Those sea horses are creeping me out!

I just got invited to speak on a panel about blog burn-out. I declined. I wouldn’t know anything about that. What’s blogger burn-out — when you’re too tired to write about yourself and have lots of people respond who don’t know you and who you are not fucking?  When would I ever get tired of that? Does she mean too exhausted to be self-indulgent? As if! Being tired of blogging would be like being tired of London, or Madmen, or eating. It doesn’t happen, not on my watch. If someone wants to get me to talk about burn-out, they will have to come up with something else like pretending to like people or being positive.

What about you?

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Happier times

Do you live inside a shoebox? Are you a scrap of paper tucked inside my notebook? Do you care how the pages feel quilted from pressing down so hard? Or the tape, now yellow, where you pasted in photo booth pictures?  Didn’t you think that someday a biographer, or a graduate student, would stumble upon the two dozen boxes, the twenty-seven notebooks, find the scraps like crumbs leading to your oven. How silly you would sound! How hard it all was! And for what? There are two kinds of people, someone once said, only can’t remember: lefties and righties, innies and outties, assholes and bigger assholes? You can not recall another Fall when the acorns underfoot were so hard to crack.

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I woke up today and felt excited in a vague way. Was it my quarter birthday? Was my favorite spin instructor planning another all Glee ride? And then it occurred to me: official publication date for the revised and updated motherfucker known as The Forest for the Trees.

Okay, I admit it. I love the little fucker. It’s one of the few things I don’t regret in my life. I regret the memoir. I regret C.L. in the twelfth grade. I regret the red and white checked polyester pants my sister referred to as a tablecloth. I regret college, especially freshman year. I regret buying the five pound jar of protein powder at Whole Foods. In fact, I hate that I ever set foot in WF. I regret the Kurt Cobain tattoo on my shoulder, and not just because I won’t be allowed to be buried in a Jewish cemetery since I’m an atheist and want my ashes left in ashtrays all over Beverly Hills.

So, if you don’t own a home copy, a travel copy, and a copy to leave in your kids’ room (the new jacket is excellent for rolling joints on and/or snorting coke), please think about buying a copy and helping put this puppy on the bestseller list. I feel that with a little help, we could easily bump off Outliers, and possibly Patriots and Pinheads. Are you with me?

Last, if you leave a comment, tell me one thing you are ridiculously proud of. Because there’s plenty of time for regrets. Love, me

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