I was never very good at weekends, and long weekends could be my undoing. When I read in William Todd Schultz’s biography of Diane Arbus that she killed herself on the Monday of a long weekend, I felt deeply sick and sad. Those Mondays in the city over a holiday weekend can be so grim. The city hissing quiet. Things folded up. Movie theaters barely filled, the air conditioning rumbling like dawn’s garbage trucks. And everyone away at some fabulous place with friends and capris and some asshole in a kiss the chef apron grilling swordfish steaks and asparagus. For a while, to combat loneliness, I joined a hiking club on that met on Sundays. It turned out to be a tight knit group of Holocaust survivors taking 3 mile hikes in a thirty mile radius outside the city. Then, we would take two tables at Bagel Nosh on the upper west side and eat. I don’t know why other people are workaholics, but for me work was my great escape from myself. It still is. This is a post for weekend writers. For every little bit of time that you can steal, that you can protect, that you can work.
Enough. What are you doing this weekend and at what cost?
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We call them pull quotes. Quotes you can pull from reviews for the back of the book. Here are a few from today’s NYT for the poet Michael Robbins. “This man can write.” “It’s a declaration that feels nearly as fresh as anything in Elvis Costello’s first LP or Quentin Tarantino’s first film…this is a linguistic booty call.” “What puts these poems over is their sheer joy and dizzy command.” “Here’s a book to hand the (as yet) nonpoetry reader in your life.” Praise the lord. Dwight Garner has a major bone for Michael Robbins. And Garner is the only critic I read and admire 98% of the time. This review is a love song. And the lines he quotes make you want to run out and buy the book or 
Vintage has sold a combined total of ten million trade paperback, eBook and audiobook copies of E.L. James‘ Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy in the last six weeks.
I can’t sleep. It’s like this most nights. I wake at four. Then the games begin. Who did I forget to call, who pissed me off, what email set me off, how I long for the days of one ringy dingy. I’ve heard of a powerful entertainment lawyer who doesn’t use mail, enthralled as he must be by the sound of his booming voice so loud it shakes the gold out of pockets. I would like to sit behind a slab of granite and smoke Camels or Gitanes or pink Nat Sherman’s. I would like , just once, to sleep through the night, not wake up screaming or thirsty beyond measure. I would like not to think about rewriting catalog copy or coming up with a blurb list or dear famous author will you stop your own important work and shit on my small self? Will you remember what it was like to a fly on the ass of a horse? How about a blow job? A bag of blow? I am not thinking about this submission. I am not thinking about money. I am not thinking about food. I did not forget to reschedule the dermatologist. I am not thinking about that email I sent maybe too impulsively. The scariest new word in the English language: Send. I am not thinking about death.
So I’m flipping through the New Yorker while enjoying a frozen Amy’s lasagna for dinner when I come upon a picture of the late Maurice Sendak standing in the woods dressed in a black robe and holding a cane that could double as wizard’s staff looking like a little Jewish wizard or a scary cult leader. Beside him his German Shepherd, Herman. The dog, he says, is of “unknowable age, because I refused to ever find out. I don’t want to know. I wish I didn’t know how old I was.” I wonder what that would be like not knowing your age. I mean you’d have clues, for instance hot flashes, grey hair at the temple, and constant irritability might suggest a women in her early fifties. Just saying. Still, I thought only the brilliant creator of Where The Wild Things Are would imagine a better life without the definitions and expectations of age.
Today I had an attack. This is when I walk by a bookstore and can’t go it. Can’t. Go. In. I know that if I see the front table offerings, all the books beautifully stacked in their best back to school clothes, and the darling shelf talkers with their lovely cursive print, and the shelves with their gorgeous mosaic of spines, and the carousel of Moleskins, I know that if see all of that and smell the coffee brewing and overhear a couple talking about Larry Shteyngart that I will feel myself fall from a great height and there will be no sound and the light, of course, will be diffuse, and later I will be sitting beneath an elm tree wishing I had a sweater, my copy of All My Pretty Ones worn, and the jacket, black and violet, an exquisite bruise about to yellow.
On our company website, each of the agents has a paragraph about the kinds of book we are looking for. In mine, I wrote that I like the “hard to categorize,” which I thought was a clever way of saying that I’m quirky, that I think outside the vag, that I welcome misfits, eccentrics, lunatics and losers. And as a result, I get the craziest shit. The “truth” is that I do like the HTC, but I probably can’t sell it. The reason is that HTC stuff is hard to package, hard to market, hard to publicize and ultimately hard to find an audience for. I could cry over the HTC books I haven’t been able to find a home for. And as a result, I’m not as open as I have been. I just turned down a beautifully written book about marrow, an epic poem about saline. I turned down a family memoir about a group of people who don’t know one another but still hurt each other, and a book of humorous essays about genocide. Am I losing my edge?
Well, I’m not one for holidays, let alone Hallmark card holidays, but I did quite enjoy mother’s day this year. It started with a text from my fifteen year old filled with many colorful emoticons and ended with burning a tic off my dog and folding three loads of laundry with all socks present and accounted for. Somewhere in between, I stretched out in the backyard with a book I’ve been dying to read: 
Betsy Lerner 