marrying my way through europe - or, what the hell are you calling yourself these days, anyway?

Some of my old friends complain that I've used up half of the space in their address books. "It would be okay if it were only in the f's or the g's or the v's or the s's, but, hey, you're all over the book."

Sadly, my nomadic, restless ways are not confined to addresses (let's see, since reaching adulthood, I've lived in four states and, um, 15, no, wait, make that 16 dwellings), but to husbands as well. I'm on my third. (She says soberly, not wanting to give the impression that it's going to go any further than that). And with each new husband, a trip to the social security office ensued.

In the old days (pre-911), you could skip on down there with nothing more than a marriage certificate and a driver's license, but those days, as we all know, are gone. Pretty much, if one wishes to change one's name in today's climate, be prepared to deliver a tome of paper trail.

According to the IRS, my name is Suzanne Vitello Soule (there's an accent on the "e" of Soule, but technology renders that invisible in most legal documentation). But every day, my latest husband extracts the mail from the box out front and delivers the ream of missives to my writing desk for a rousing game of "Guess who lives here now!" Suzy K Vitello, Suzanne Graham, Susie V Soule. The New Yorker thinks I'm Suzy Gram. Most creditors still go by Suzanne Vitello. In-laws from a couple marriages back put all the names down, just to be on the safe side. Only Syracuse University and their savvy development staff have been able to keep up with my name-changing hijinks, and for that they deserve to be rewarded by occasional donations.

For the uninitiated, my formal pedigree is as follows: Suzanne Kathleen Freisinger Vitello Graham Soule. "You change names as often as I change my underwear," said my friend Kelly, once. And when my writer friends acknowledge me in their books, they've been known to ask: "So just what is your name these days?"

Alas, I know I should care more about my name than I do. Perhaps I'm so aloof that I really don't think it makes that much difference? It certainly doesn't keep me up at night. But this morning I followed the Twitter trail, and slapped up against this provocative post by Alison Winn Scotch on the very subject of writers and names.

In establishing the all-important platform, does it undermine readership, credibility, brand, to change your name? In marketing, when we advise clients to "rebrand" e.g. new logo, new web site, new, look & feel, it's very externally focused. "Keep up with the times," we insist. "Make a connection with your audience."

In art, though, the idea is to be visible on the strength of one's essence. Name it. Be it. Live it.

I decided, with this latest marriage, that in the writing world I really haven't been anything but Vitello. Occasionally, as a journalist, I've scabbed a name before or after the Vitello, but really, my writerly identity is commensurate with that name. Though--I don't have one Italian molecule in my DNA.

Here's my dilemma. I'm now working on a book that is an organic outgrowth of my heritage and passion, and a good part of the book is set in Austria, where I was born, whence my paternal lineage hails, and where the name I used as a maiden, the first 24 years of my life, comes from. That my née name is Freisinger might be very helpful if the book I'm now writing becomes my first published book. I mean, if Amy Tan got married to a "Smith" and she tried to publish under that name, would Joy Luck Club even have a platform?

clarity part two

If you missed part 1, catch up with part 2. Erin Reel interviews Chuck Palahniuk, Chelsea Cain, Diana Jordan and yours truly in her ongoing blogshop. This month's topic? Clarity. Are we clear, or just plain Evil at Heart? You be the judge!

reading (or tweeting) on the throne

So at workshop the other night, one of our members had a scene involving a female, a book and a toilet, which prompted one of our many tangential topics: do women read on the toilet?

If our merry band is a sample, then I would say more than half do. Let's face it, modesty aside, we're a culture of multitaskers, and women have always excelled at doing more than one thing at a time, so wouldn't it be natural to assume that taking care of two things with one, er, stone, would follow?

Anyone brave enough to be part of a poll involving reading, gender and the throne? And, taking it a step further, any of you take your digital devices to the bathroom with you? (iPhones, laptops, etc)?

Using technology as a note-taking device

I'm hot on the trail of my new project, and as I hunker down and press forward, I've discovered that I can use blogging as a sort of repository to develop voice, plot point, dialogue.

The danger is, of course, that my writing time may become fragmented and fraught with time-sucking labors that derail my daily page count goals. So, here's a little experiment I'm trying. At the end of my writing day, I take some bits of prose (deemed at the time as successful, but in the light of day, who knows), and plop them down in my character blog. In this case, my Empress Elisabeth blog.

If you visit the blog, take note the posting date! And, please don't tell Blogger I'm cheating on it with Wordpress!

the empress

This blog post by Erin Reel, "The Lit Coach," couldn't have come at a better time.

I've been stymied as to where to go next (or first, with regard to a book deal). My latest manuscript, STAIRWAY OF LOVE, has reached its conclusion, and I feel it's at a stage where it could be picked up, albeit some revisions and tweaking here and there. But while waiting for feedback from those considering it, I reengaged with a project that I've been flirting with for five years: a novel (or series of novels) about the notorious Austrian Empress, Elisabeth.

Her story has always fascinated me, ever since I was a tiny girl, living, literally, down the street from the Hofburg. On a trip back to Vienna a few years ago, I absorbed myself in everything Sisi. Her childhood, her obsessions, her anxiety, her hair!

It wasn't until recently that I realized the Empress story has a very marketable and fascinating position as a YA historical novel --really, a series of novels, so, while STAIRWAY gets juggled about with lukewarm agent interest, I've set to work, burning through my first draft of THE EMPRESS CHRONICLES.

I'd actually never considered writing for this audience before, but I'm finding that I'm exploding with ideas and ways to dramatize her compelling story. Stay tuned for more, but with any luck, I should have this draft completed by mid October.

the walking in the woods cure

Is it true that as you get older transitions become harder? Man, getting back into my routine after two weeks away from it is proving difficult.

Maybe it's because I've set up my life in this multi-component, pastiche that the "running as fast as I can to stay only one step behind" truism persists, though on the heels of a 12-hour sleepathon, it should not.

My creative drive is more robust than ever, I'm happy to report, but clarity is coming in small bursts instead of large, sustainable waves. Today though, I went back to one of my favorite cures for fatiguing and disappointing bouts of ADD: a long overdue power walk loop through Forest Park. Extra points due to the misting shower that semi-soaked me.

For a while I lived at the edge of that great park, and more recently I leased an office down the street from it. Now that I'm over the hill from the Lower Macleay it takes a more forethought and planning to traipse along its majestic trails. But like all welcome habits, halfway through my walk today, my spirit and sense of actualness returned to me, and things I'd been mulling over dutifully aligned with the blessed sense of order I'd been seeking.

I returned to my desk energized and focused. And rested, even. But more than anything, grateful--which is, for me, most important of all.

off the grid

Tuesday night I fly East to Buffalo and Canada for ten days of family/vacation/regrouping and connecting. I'm not bringing my laptop. I'll have the iPhone along, but only plan on using it for the weather and the foreign exchange rates.

Really, that's my plan.

There might be a little detox crabby restlessness that goes along with the prying my keyboard from my cold, dead hands, but, having done this for a week last August, I do see the benefits in, as a colleague puts it, sharpening the saw.

A client of mine (who shoots me far more daily emails than any other person, but who doesn't engage in social media) shared the actual hard copy of this terrific article by one of my favorite satirists, Gary Shteyngart. In the article, Shteyngart chronicles the ways in which his life changed upon signing up for his smart phone: "'This right here,' said the curly-haired, 20-something Apple Store glam-nerd who sold me my latest iPhone, 'is the most important purchase you will ever make in your life,'" he whines. Then, goes on to recall, "He looked at me, trying to gauge whether the holiness of this moment had registered as he passed me the Eucharist with two firm, unblemished hands.

So starts Shteyngart's adventure in the world of diverted attention. NYC disappears, overnight, and is replaced by all things global via his pocket-sized computer. His addiction leads him to long to dry out in the barless pockets of upstate NY, where he will partake in a data fast, and reengage with actual books by dead authors.

So, friends, I too will be pilgramming to the hinterlands for some cyber-relief. Off the grid, disconnected, and free to process experience without the lens of predigested information.

summer of blame

Summer incites the edges of possibility. When I was very young, daydreams overtook, responding, perhaps, to the heat. Following Thermodynamic Law. If wishes were horses than beggars would ride. Everything either was or could be mine. Days stretched and lapped boredom. Summer was a lifetime.

Late adolescence, early adulthood boys and booze--those summers possibility courted excitement. I got into my share of trouble.

So now, wedged into potentially inert middle-age, where blockbusters, beach reads and food that hovers around poison (deep fried onions dipped in blue cheese dressing? Really?) begin to vie for a spot on the calendar, I turn to the rascal inside me. That sunlit muse; that mercurial sprite. And how it comes, when it comes, is as instinct for paradigm subversion. Because I'm pretty broke this summer, all my trouble needs to be free, and luckily, our library system is one of the best, if not the best, in the country.

Finally, I worked my way up the holds queue and it's my turn for Blame.

I'm three-quarters through it and I'm making myself put it down, lest I plummet too quickly in post-good-read-depression. What makes this book so damn good, you ask? At the risk of being hopelessly derivative, I'm with Brigitte Frase, whose LA Times review called Huneven's prose "elegant" while suggesting that even better than elegant prose is aesthetic pleasure. The delicate, unsentimental perp-walk along moral ambiguity, unapologetic nakedness and the darkest of the shadow of humanity has me so engaged, I'm nearly paralyzed. Which is the other side of summer: the promise of unending sloth. Dog days, they're called, but I think of them more as cat days. Willful suspension of brain activity in favor of wonder and magic.

Huneven's book blows everything out of the water. You must read it.

resilience

My sister-in-law, Lisa Walker, died on July 2. This time last year, unless you were privy to microscopic changes in her body, she was the picture of health. The week of Christmas, six months ago, she learned that a nagging pain under her rib cage was not a gall bladder problem.

That's how pancreatic cancer works. Silently. Quickly. Intrusively.

It's too soon for me to write about this in detail. Down the road I certainly plan to, but for now, I'm in that hazy grief-fog, just trying to remember why it is again that I went to the grocery store? What have we run out of? Where did I park the car?

In the Charlotte airport awaiting my connecting flight home, I picked up a consumable book. Something I could start, read, finish before touchdown at PDX. I didn't want anything funny. I didn't want anything too literary. I didn't want anything stupid. Less than 250 pages. A paperback, easily crammable in my more than two carry-on items which, in order to avoid the ridiculous $25 fee, I knew I'd need to consolidate or parcel out to my kids (even in grief, I'm cheap, it appears).

I ambled down the book shelf at the newsstand, picking up, rejecting. I briefly considered a book of Sudoku puzzles for the disabled. A similar book of crosswords. And then, there she was, Elizabeth. The pillar--the icon--of a woman pummeled. Repeatedly. Name a shitty thing, and Elizabeth Edwards has suffered it. A suddenly dead child. Breast cancer that won't go away. A lying, cheating fuckwad of a husband. Intrusive media. A vicious, attention-seeking mistress who got herself knocked up. I expected the book to suck, of course. Churned out memoirs of the famously shafted typically are.

Resilience not only does not suck, it's fantastic. Rather than being driven by solipsistic rants and martyr-infused sentimentality, this little memoir, I hope, will find itself amid other thought-provoking, poetic, honest books, like Gift from the Sea. Or even, dare I say it, Auster's The Invention of Solitude.

Having just spent hours watching a beloved relative die an untimely death; her agonal breathing still embossed in my brain, her husband's weeping, her children, my children, her parents, her best friends, coming to grips with a loss as big or bigger than any they had suffered previously, Resilience was the only book I could have attended. It is not written from the distance of safety; it's penned in the midst of devastation and unprocessed grief, and yet, it's coherent, lovely, full of the sort of wisdom that only comes from asking questions, and following a depth of inquiry that leads to a sort of celebration. I'm alive, still, kept being the message.

So God bless Elizabeth. Say what you will about celebrity memoirs and bids for attention, Resilience is an important book.

let's talk about the hottest writing group in Portland

Jeff Baker, The Oregonian's books editor, wrote a very comprehensive article about our writing group that appears in today's O section.

He did a great job (and I'm not just saying that 'cause I got the call-out in the print version and Cheryl Strayed was quoted as naming me the "best writer without a book in Portland") capturing the spirit of our merry band. And, I have to remark that, it's not exactly easy to flesh out a profile on a large group like ours. It's sort of like writing a scene with multiple characters and keeping the energy moving forward. The juxtaposition! The flow! The dialogue! Baker nailed them all.

Now I'm going to take my "house mother" self back up to the soccer pitch where fifteen eleven-year-old boys need cheering on!

Trying to be fueled by distraction

My son woke up today and narrated a very interesting dream. His first ever (as far as I can tell) stress dream. All the players in his eleven-year-old life were featured, and the first person character kept getting into trouble.

It got me thinking about how storytellers develop. How much is narration, how much is perspective, how much is will. My little guy is on the cusp of adolescence and pushing against everything he knows while clawing to keep safe and secure in his frame of reference. It's the hardest time to parent, because as a mother you're continually stretched between the whole roots-and-wings concept. Allow enough unstructured time for creativity and personality to bloom while staying very, very close to set the walls up just in the nick of time.

It's the main reason I moved my office back home, and I have to keep reminding myself of that.

This week I have Carson in "skateboard camp"--again, trying to straddle the line between structure and fun. Skateboard camp is a little more lax than, say, baseball camp, as noted when one of the "instructors" handed me the medical release form he should have given me yesterday. "We sort of, um, forgot."

Meanwhile, I'm trying to figure out how to keep from going upstairs for another plate of hummus and Ak Mak crackers every five minutes.

Years ago, my colleague Monica Drake and I hosted a workshop that she named "Fueled by Distraction." The idea was to harness the energy of distraction to pour into satisfying art rather than to be derailed by the myriad distractions we artists are so seduced by. (And that was before Facebook!)

Wherever I am, the tendency to jump ship on deep concentration is pulling at me--and working from home offers a whole new array of possibilities. This week though, my son is sequestered in a concrete bowl being supervised by stoned teenagers. I need to seize the opportunity and get to it. But first, another mug of microwaved coffee...

I just want to be a blue dress party girl when I grow up

Today I woke up with a sore throat and a bad attitude. It was Monday, and I usually love Mondays because they herald structure, and structure, for a person of scattered tendencies, is a good thing. But today, on the heels of our big Mad Menesque soire, my son's graduation from the U, and myriad loose ends, I sorta didn't want to get out of bed.

I am a bit adrift right now--having passed my novel off to an agent for appraisal, and sorting through the various false starts and stories that could be forever tightened, and the screenplay I have just begun, not to mention a queue of work-work, an overflowing inbox, the beck and call of social media, the need to keep up, respond, reply, etc, I, plain and simple, wanted to go back to being a hostess at a cocktail party.

I ticked off the work stuff, watched the gorgeous Spanish men win a soccer match, and noted that it didn't rain today (although it's still MUCH TOO COLD), and did nothing for my writing. I did not write at all! Not a lick. Bah!

Tomorrow, then.

Friends Forever

Today my youngest child took part in what serves as a graduation ceremony from elementary school. I use the qualifier because the public school system prefers "promotion" to graduation, but for me, the semantic distinction is silly. For more than half of his life he's reported to a building, been part of a community, and now he's leaving it. He's graduating.

And it's a big deal.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not about to rue this passage or lament this leap away from childhood, but I will weep. I'm certain of that. I will tear up because that's what mommies do when their babies are clearly not babies any longer. A huge piece of my heart is in that school. It's where Carson lost teeth, learned to read and write, and gained prowess on the jungle gym. As their "promotion" song suggests, the friendships he made at Maplewood will stay with him until he breathes his last.

Here he is, the smaller of the two boys in red t-shirts, dancing something called "the jerk." Thank God he's still young and innocent enough not to get the irony in that name. For now, anyway!

The Passion Parade

I love writing about Passion. Watching passion unfold in a fledgling writer, or a writer who's had a breakthrough. Lately, I've had more than my share of opportunities to be part of the Passion Parade.

I have a piece on David Jackson in this month's Goodness Magazine, and it's one of the few times I've enjoyed re-reading something of mine in print--rather than scanning the article for errors, as is typical, I sunk into it, like a reader, and allowed the subject and his zest to talk to me--invite me into his world--which I gladly relived.

I've also been working with a visual artist, helping him find his voice inside of a series of lyric essays. The process has been delightful and engaging. Working with this client, I get to revisit my own journey with the pen, discover anew why it is I do what I do. The magic of it. The sweet whisper in the ear. The disappearing hours. The floats and marching bands--even the shitting parade horses. I've never been a Rose Festival Queen, but I'm feeling pretty damn happy with my baton.

Rock and Roll and Steve Almond

Remember when all that kept the breath going in and out of your flat little chest was shutting your bedroom door, slamming down the Close 'n Play, and wailing along with Linda Ronstadt as she compared her broken heart to a wheel? Or maybe bootleg Dead tapes were your thing: Smokestack Lightning at the Filmore, sheeeeettt! Or, like my darling husband, The Guess Who still trips your trigger. He had a roommate his first year in college who played the band's one record religiously. The Pavlovian association with American Woman and brewskis, all that.

Reading Steve Almond's Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life brings it all back. Almond's homage to the music that caused him to become a Drooling Fanatic (DF), along with delicious rants about the vapid pop that plagues the masses, makes this the latest must read in Almond's theme-driven memoirs. (C'mon Steve, candy, music, dare I ask what's next???)

The book is laugh-out-loud funny, btw, and his accompanying tour--complete with a "bad hair" introductory slide show and playlist, offers more goodies, including Almond's comedic timing and charm.

I have to admit though--I don't quite have the chops to call myself a DF. Maybe a DFH (Drooling Fanatic Hag), since, as a college coed, I hung out with guys for whom Jerry was God, and a lost weekend meant quizzically enduring a Pink Floyd marathon, but me myself, my devotion is causal. Can't face the treadmill without Jungleland pumping into my earbuds, and don't be playing Brandi Carlile's cover of Hallelujah if you're not handing me an ice cold Scotch.

Like Almond, though, I get cranky at the effervescent popularity of inane tunes, especially when I see my kid latching onto, say, Replay by the hip hop icon I.Y.A.Z.

Replay, how apt! Especially since every car trip in the past three months has been accompanied with:
Shawty´s like a melody
in my head
That I can´t keep out...

(in an effort to proffer forth my disapproval in a palatable way, I made up even stupider Weird Al-esque lyrics:
Hotter than a four-slice toaster
that girl is a crime they say...)

And what's up with, I queried my boy, Shawty--which seems to be the pervading slang common denominator in my son's top ten.

"It means girlfriend, Mom." At eleven, he's got eye-rolling down.

Shawty is indeed the latest tweener euphemism for girlfriend. The Urban Dictionary defines it as fine ass woman, so there you go.

Over the last couple of weeks Carson seems to have moved on from Replay, thank God, and on to an I.Y.A.Z. song I like better (though it's similarly mindless) -- Solo, which he plans to sing (ironically) in duet with another boy in the upcoming fifth grade talent show. My stomach hurts in vicarious embarrassment--have I spawned an exoticizer? Will he be wearing his ballcap backwards with his dungarees exposing his boxers whilst arranging his fingers into a palsy-like spasm? Is today's appropriation of hip hop by white kids the latest minstrel show?

But, alas, I have to let my child figure this all out on his own. After all, I was that lame ass (as opposed to fine ass) teenage girl listening to Ronstadt's covers of the world's most banal love songs. (Desperado, anyone?) And, the place in my brain where memorized Shakespeare sonnets should reside is SRO with the lyrics to all of Jim Croce's woebegotten ballads. I have some ammunition though. This morning's breakfast music included Almond's online soundtrack of Bob Schneider's Get Fucked Up and Do Some Fucking blaring from my computer. With all that funky inappropriateness from which to rebel, my kid will have to try a lot harder to shock his mama.

setting up shop

For the past four days I've been setting up my new writing space in the new house, and I'm finding myself being overly particular about what goes where, and what gets tossed and where to put my reference books versus favorite novels versus administrative crap.

I've been resisting cracking open several old plastic bins that contain relics--fragments of my late adolescence and the slips of paper upon which I wrote sophomorically profound epiphanies. But crack them I have, and up bubbled some discourse between my dad and I dating back to college. The epistolary exchange developed over my wanting to quit biochemistry and hence derail my journey toward becoming a registered dietitian.

My dad's points were carefully wrought and admittedly full of ego and regret. Essentially, the message was: buckle down and get your credentials like I did. My retort: I'm not sure I'm cut out for a life as a clinician. Instead, I see myself as a vagabond who follows her heart. Funnily enough, the argument hinged on independence. How without the right credentials one is beholden to compromise.

My, my how the world has turned that one on its ear. My father, as a 72-yr old physician, is at the mercy of a broken system, while I basically do whatever the hell I want. True, I don't make a lot of dough, but as I disgorge the tools of my trade, liberate them from their plastic bins and cardboard boxes and build my nest: the books, the letters, the memories, the scribbles, I realize that, at 22, I wasn't a complete moron after all. Good to know!

Ah, nostalgia. You move and there you are, smacked in the face with it. Now, the big question. To chuck or not to chuck!

homage to the writing space at 8305

In this house I've written, maybe, a million pages. Ok, doing the math, more realistically, 500,000. Nethertheless, in the eleven years I've lived here, a half-dozen novels have been drafted, two of which I've considered "done." I've written poetry here. dozens of essays. Possibly 50 articles. I won't even start with blog posts, emails, and other outgoing missives.

Saying goodbye to a writing space is a subset of the general goodbye--less fraught with toil, but infused with emotion. Yesterday, I found myself dissolved to tears several times. Out of nowhere: grief, sorrow, frustration. The things I did, the things I failed to do (yes, I'm aware this sounds like a Catholic creed).

In this house I've written award-winning pieces. I've received great news (grants, prizes, publication), and countless rejections. I sit here stymied by the hope, dashed hope, and tenacity of the writers' life manifest. And, of course, part of me wonders where it will all go. Will I be able to write in my new house? Will I be so besieged by the trivialities and pragmatic concerns (I have to buy a microwave! All the walls are dingy and dated! Get rid of the carpet in favor of the virgin hardwood that lies underneath!) that writing will forever take a back burner to swapping out the burners on the ancient cooktop?

Ah. And oy. And aye! Lament but press on!

Coincidentally, I have packaged up my manuscript, and SOL is now rattling about in the hands of others--being appraised, considered, what have you. Closure abounds.

And yet.

I'm itching to channel some of this free-floating angst in a productive direction. All of My Children Are Not Here awaits!

Writers' Homicide

My days are spent alternating between fondling sentences and wrestling words to the ground. Sometimes, the other way around. Occasionally words pin me to the mat so hard, I lie helpless, paralyzed, suffocating. Block, you say? I think not! When words fail me it's more like homicide. Writers' Homicide. The pen of self-inflicting sword-like slashings.

This is not happening at the moment, as a certain mania has taken hold, and I'm serving up words as fast as a short order grill cook--but a couple of weeks ago, I experienced a frightening lull in my ability and desire to write.

I've been told that those periods are fertile ground for collecting, as opposed to spewing. That they are every bit as important to the writer's cycle as output. I've always been skeptical of that. Somewhat. What I realize in hindsight with this particular go-round is that there is a difference between active and passive wool-gathering, and it has to do with synthesizing information, putting it into context, and filing it in the creative part of the noggin. It's not fugue state, but rather, extended curiosity. Making space for inquiry.

Now, on the other side of this Writers' Homicide, I'm ready to go out and slay a thing or two.

tranquility

Yesterday, at 3:30 p.m., my house officially passed along to its next owner. As with many big life transitions, the exchange was marked by last-minute drama and craziness, but in the end, the transaction prevailed, and I am now officially a renter.

Next week I will once again be a homeowner, but for now, I'm basking in the interstitial splendor of it all.

To fully appreciate my respite from real estate, I've taken advantage of my good friend Laura's offer to hole up in her houseboat for a few days.

This morning I'm looking over the channel, watching low-flying geese flapping and honking in pairs, swerving to miss the occasional tugboat or barge. My husband left early this morning for his job as a teacher across town, and I immersed myself in some writing as the river and sky unfolded in light, feeling the invitation to absorb the minutes of the day instead of scything through them.

Unaccustomed pleasure

Last week I read a book. For pleasure. That may not sound like a big whoop, but, actually, it's been several MONTHS since I've allowed myself to sink into a book without a pen in my hand. I'd forgotten how deliriously indulgent that is.

The book I read wasn't even one I'd picked out--it was pilfered from my husband's sleeping body: Jhumpa Lahiri's UNACCUSTOMED EARTH. He'd read two or three of the stories (not in order, even, sacrelige!) and when he had fallen asleep in the sun, the book on his chest, I snatched it, and wouldn't give it back. (Don't you HATE when people do that?)

I'd read THE NAMESAKE years ago, and loved it, and anytime she has a piece in the New Yorker, I devour it, but the bliss of following her heart through the trials of the various Bengali families in her pages was nearly as satisfying as swimming with dolphins.

The partial pastiche she created, the negative space, the deft shifts in POV, offered a larger story than NAMESAKE--a mural as opposed to a single painting. In the end, Lahiri's book left me feeling fuller, richer, sadder and wiser. I love when that happens.