I think I have my great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandma's earlobes.

Please click on the link to see my family tree on my mother’s side – I think.

Mary Queen of Scots

Unless you’ve read much about her career, you might have the impression – as I first did – that her spot in the publishing world was another case of who you are and who you know rather than what you know. But that is only partly true. Certainly, her mentor at Viking Books was immediately open to giving her a job because of her connections with fascinating people.

But over the next two decades she made her mark by supporting authors who came to her with all kinds of ideas. Though she worked with some big names, she also had a knack for spotting interesting stories and she would nurture her authors through the writing process, making handwritten notes that demonstrated her knowledge of the topic and her innate sense for what keeps readers interested. She was effusive in her praise and bemused by authors who themselves were some real characters, including one who stood on top of her desk to demonstrate the march of a Prussian soldier.

She capitalized on her artistic flair by producing many lushly illustrated books – not all coffee table books with nice pictures and filler – but real stories with pictures of places in time. Two years after joining Viking, she resigned over a flap involving an unflattering book the publisher released about Teddy Kennedy. She joined Doubleday and remained loyal, despite change in ownership and philosophy. Although author Greg Lawrence keeps reminding his readers that Jackie was treated like any other editor who had to sell a book on its potential for profit – she would often snatch manuscripts out of the slush pile and make a writer’s day. One author describes how he was dejectedly eating pork and beans straight out of the can when Mrs. Onassis phoned and his dad answered the call. It was a moment both men would remember.

This book is written in chronological order with anecdotes from writers, editors and friends who remember the genesis of each book. I wonder what Jackie would have written in the manuscript margins. If I were the book editor, I would suggest a less workmanlike accounting. It’s too much for the reader to remember. This reader anyhow. At work, I’m reading a technical manual to teach myself some new tricks. Technical book reading is about as much fun as an appendectomy. But this particular book is very readable. It’s like a good friend is sitting down with you, showing you some code, and then letting you try it yourself to see the results.

I think the Jackie book would have been more readable if the author broke the story into book types. Or if he was less repetitive about how Jackie was a kind, brilliant and nurturing editor and if we could see a little more of her in the workplace. About the only fresh insight came from Jackie’s good friend Carly Simon, who summered with her on Martha’s Vineyard. The two women shared their vulnerabilities. A little bit of trivia I didn’t know: Carly Simon’s father is the Simon in Simon & Schuster. The world of the glitterati and literati is very small indeed (unless you start counting people like John and Kate, their eight and Russell Brand – whoever the hell they are and why do we care?)

At the end of the book, the author lists four pages of books published by Mrs. Onassis. It is also surprising to me that book editors were so prolific. Here is a baker’s dozen. Just a sample, really.

1. “Sally Hemings” by Barbara Chase-Riboud
2. “Himself! The Life and Times of Mayor Richard J. Daley” by Eugene Kennedy
3. “Inventive Paris Clothes: A Photographic Essay” by Irving Penn and Diana Vreeland.
4. “Fred Astaire: His Friends Talk” by Sarah Giles
5. “Egyptian Time” by Robert Lyons
6. “Stanford White’s New York” by David Garrard Lowe
7. “Diary of a Napoleonic Foot Soldier” by Jakob Walter
8. “The Garden of Life: An Introduction to the Healing Plants of India” by Naveen Patnaik
9. “The Power of Myth” by Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers
10. “Fireworks: A History and Celebration” by George Plimpton
11. “How to Save Your Own Street” by Raquel Ramati
12. “Moonwalk” by Michael Jackson
13. “Up Through the Water” by Darcy Steinke

My Darrin (which means Dear One in some language)

After a month or so of taking her to the vet for what first appeared to be some infection on her head that wouldn’t heal, we were told today that she had an aggressive tumor and would only have a couple of months to live. I felt my legs go weak when my husband called to deliver the news.

Early on, I had Googled her symptoms and saw nasal cancer as one of several possibilities. When the vet said they’d often seen animals have a hard time fighting infection because some foreign body like a claw or something that had to be removed, I told myself to stop thinking the worst.

Today she was going in to either have surgery to remove the claw or some salve put on the nose, which had just started oozing on Christmas. I thought the oozing meant the infection was going to start pouring out and that she was on the mend – my Christmas miracle.

I guess I was wrong. I’m wrong about so many things and have loved and lost so often the last several years that I’m just numb. Just last night I held my Darrin like a baby. She looked at me with her big green eyes and seemed to love being encased in the Irish wool afghan. I never even saw her off this morning. I was expecting to be holding her again tonight. You just never know when you are going to lose someone dear to you. Sometimes you see it coming, but some time it hits you like a bludgeon between the eyes. I got a lot of my wailing out of the way on the drive home from work. I cried again when I saw her red snowflake fleece throw that lately she liked to tunnel under with her tail hanging out.

“Where’s Darrin?!” we’d say, playing along with the game. “What’s under this afghan?” We’d squeeze the bump and it wiggled.

We’re going to be asking where Darrin is a lot the next few weeks, even though I know she’s in Heaven with her brother, Hobbes.

I was 75 percent of the way through the book and kept wondering when they were going to get to the part about the World’s Fair. That doesn’t happen until the end when young Edgar wins honorable mention in an essay contest, and free admission to the fair for his family. It was a moment of great triumph for the 9-year-old and a source of pride to his parents, who enjoy themselves for the first time in years when the fair offers them a glimpse of a bright new world.

What makes this book worth the read is the vivid description of small moments in a young boy’s life. Doctorow describes the simplest occurrences with a bit of awe, as experienced by a boy who takes in everything around him. I suspected, but didn’t know for sure, that this was an autobiographical novel. I knew that Doctorow was a Russian Jew who would have grown up in those days of “The Green Hornet”, washboards, and Philco radios.

About halfway through the book the boy’s name is uttered for the first time by his mother. “Edgar” she says, and that’s when I knew for sure that Edgar in the book was Edgar L. Doctorow. At that point it was even more amazing that a man who at that point would be 54 could have such vivid memories of childhood. Certainly, we all remember things about growing up, but the sensual specifics that make up this tale are simply astonishing.

Nothing more than faith in their abilities, the willingness to put in the time, a profound appreciation for great writers before them, and the ability to throw away thousands of pages of work without feeling they’ve wasted their time.

When you think of all of those ingredients, it is pretty amazing you can walk into a bookstore (the ones that are still left) and see shelf after shelf of fiction. All of these people were published! Pretty amazing stuff. Yet, there is a much smaller subset of authors who are giants in their field.

Joyce Carol Oates is widely regarded as one of those giants and I plucked this book off the library shelf a couple of weeks ago to see if she could answer my question about “what makes a book ‘important’?”

Turns out that she answers my question on Page 111. If you’ve thought a lot about writing many of these answers are not surprising, but you might find a few new points to ponder:

Why was this story written? Is this story significant enough to have warranted the effort first of its own composition, and secondly the reader’s participation? Is it original? Is it convincing? Is the language appropriate? Am I a slightly different person for having read it than I had been previously? Will I urge others to read this story and will I want to reread it myself and to read other work by the author? Above all, what have I learned from this story as a writer?

If you have to answer “yes” to all of these questions, it is no wonder that some pretty entertaining wordsmiths can’t get the enthusiasm to start.

But the genius behind great literature is really not that unattainable. Well, if you don’t put your personal comfort before telling your important story.

Artists get inspiration in some pretty prosaic ways. London author Henry James grasped inspiration from dinner table conversations he would eavesdrop on. He didn’t want to hear how some of the cockamamie stories ended, so that he could craft his own story from the conversation threads.

Oates clears her mind by running, or simply looking out the window and marveling at nature. She places great emphasis on epiphanal moments and writes these important thoughts down on scraps of paper until some of the scraps find their way into her literary works, like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle. She likes to know how a story is going to end before she finishes. That seems like good advice. Without seeing the ending, it would seem one is floating in space, stringing together words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, paragraphs into chapters – but what is the meaning you want readers to take away from this book? Often that is summed up in the satisfying dessert at the end.

Norman Mailer meticulously saved characters sketches for years before sitting down to write “The Naked and the Dead”. His next novel “Barbary Shore” was seemingly more spontaneous. Perhaps one needs the structure Mailer put into his first creation, before it starts to flow naturally.

Oates notes that writers are often pushed to put the words on paper so that their important insights can be handed down throughout the ages, rather than dying along with the author.

It is important for all aspiring writers to read. That can not be overstated, but reading can not become a distraction from finally sitting down and doing the hard work of creating.

You’re a know-it-all phony, who really doesn’t know a damned thing. You ascribe meaning where there is none and you’ve gone so far as to purposefully set yourself up to fail. You’re no more special than the next guy – even though you are sure you are unique – and people spend a lot less time thinking about you than you think they do.

Yes, I’m talking about you. And you. And you. And me.

I know all this because David McRaney told me. McRaney is a two-time winner of the William Randolph Hearst Award, which after you read this book you will realize means jackshit in terms of being an authority on what’s wrong with everybody. He earns that distinction by being a self-described psychology nerd. He seems to have read every study every academician ever did on the workings of the human mind and he puts them all together in the book of 48 logical fallacies.

If you like words like jackshit, you’ll probably like this book too. McRaney gives it to you right between the eyes, you arrogant, sanctimonious dipshit!

This book will make you smarter, since you weren’t that smart to begin with. Now you’ll be able to tell when salesmen, your boss, your professor and your spouse are messing with your brain. This is one of those books that you might even want to buy, except you might be able to get all this for free on the web site with the same name.

Anyhow, I could write more but my husband is waiting for his crack at the book, ever since I read him an interesting example of how you can persuade people to think something just by using the right verb.

Gimme, gimme, gimme. OK. Here. You can be as smart as me in about a week.

When their parents died in the 1920s they went on living in their Harlem brownstone, but their eccentric nature and disrespect for bill collectors brought some notoriety. Homer, because he was blind, could only imagine the squalor they were living in. The mess was caused by Langley who had a fondness for collecting everything from stacks of newspapers, musical instruments, artwork, and a dilapidated Model A Ford, which he actually somehow managed to get through the doors so he could park it in the house.

Their real story ends in 1947 when neighbors reported smelling something rotten coming from the home. Police first found Homer sitting in chair emaciated and dead. Days later after hauling away piles of debris they found Langley, dressed in a bathrobe and attempting to crawl toward Homer with a plate of food. One of his booby traps, designed to keep invaders out, fell on him and trapped him. His decomposing body had become dinner for the rats who’d taken up residence.

This was a weird story years before my time. I’d never heard of the brothers until reading H.L. Doctorow’s fictional representation of the lives “Homer and Langley”. Doctorow advises readers at the beginning that while the characters were actual people, the narrative and thoughts of the two men were a product of his own imagination. Doctorow also took some liberties with timelines, extending their lives to the 1970s, perhaps as a way to introduce the two men to the Hippie culture.

In one scene, the brothers go for one of their customary constitutionals through Central Park and run into a group of Hippies who embrace the two strangers as kindred spirits. Homer figures it was their unkempt appearance that made them look like they would be aging Hippies. The Hippies, looking for a place to crash, end up living in the Collyer hovel for a while until they were swept away with the first chill of winter.

This wasn’t an uninteresting book. It was different than anything I’d ever read lately. But I wouldn’t tell all my friends they just had to go out and get it, Doctorow’s reputation as a literary lion notwithstanding. It was short for a novel and Doctorow might have wanted it that way – not bringing in too many historical details or bit players in order to focus only on the inner lives of these men, or at least the inner lives as seen through the dead eyes of Homer.

After our Halloween costume contest, the work fun committee is now planning a holiday potluck, with a Secret Santa and cubicle-decorating contest to make things a bit more interesting. I’ve been flipping through holiday decorating books thinking of a “theme” for this year at home. My husband, who should just go out to the garage and do guy things, is having to add his two cents to my ideas. He and my friend are traditionalists. They like multi-colored Christmases and enjoy putting the same ornaments on the tree year after year. What would Christmas be without a dozen different horse ornaments, after all?

I like simplicity, tranquility and softness. I was pushing for an all green-and-white Christmas this year. “Ugh”, said my traditionalists. “How cold!”

No, how tranquil, ye of little decorating vision.

Thank God for the cubicle decorating contest. A place I can call my own. It’s only about 8 feet by 8 feet, but an imaginative person can do a lot with that space.

I’m thinking a pile of fake snow outside my cube with a welcome mat and green tinsel wrapping paper on the cubicle door with a big white ribbon. I might rig up a spotlight in the aisle outside my cube to shine on my door. A braided rug to make things cozy. Maybe I’ll swap out my desk chair for a rocking chair. Thinking of wearing red flannel jammies. Lots of green and white stuff. Flowers, pine swags, a little flocked tree for right outside my cube. A plate of cookies on my filing cabinet. Christmas music playing. Serene Christmas music like Jim Brickman. Some white snowflakes hanging overhead. Slippers. I might even be able to find a cheap cardboard fireplace at Goodwill. Growing up, we had no fireplace. But we did have the cardboard fireplace. Even as a stupid kid I wasn’t fooled. Maybe I’ll get a fake dog and put him on a dog bed by the fireplace.

I may never go home.