Dear Myla Goldberg,

The False Friend

Thank you for your stunning novel, The False Friend.  I read it while I was in a neck brace recovering from cervical fractures and craving distraction from my initial failure to sleep very long sitting up. The delayed reaction of thirty-one-year-old Celia to her part in the death of her childhood friend Djuna back in the eighties drew me in at once. Djuna and Celia, leaders of their clique of five eleven-year-old girls, mercilessly criticize and/or exclude the other three

Little Red Riding Hood

until the afternoon when Djuna disappears. On the way home from school, all five girls take a forbidden road bordered by a woods, a forest primeval right out of Grimm. In the heat of one of her stormy fights with Celia, Djuna stomps off the road into the thicket. Infuriated, Celia follows while the others wait. Celia returns alone. Djuna is never seen again. Has Djuna gotten into a stranger’s brown car as all the girls, including Celia, attest to the police and parents at the time? Or has she fallen down an abandoned well where Celia left her to die as Celia insists after a kind of epiphany two decades later?

Celia’s shocking revelation took me right back to my own long ago girlhood. Were any surprises lurking there? Had I, like Celia and Djuna, once been

Mean Girls

what today we think of as a “mean girl?” Had I been a victim of mean girls? Had I been part of a close but volatile best friendship like Celia and Djuna’s when I was eleven? I honestly don’t recall ever picking on another kid, but I do recall being ridiculed one endless summer in sleepover camp. The very first night when I stripped down to my undershirt, I learned that my busty bra-wearing bunkmates had no compassion for late bloomers. They taunted me mercilessly. Somehow, I survived even though, in addition to being flat chested, I was neither pretty nor athletic nor adventuresome like Celia. These traits made her a leader in spite of her mean streak. By eleven I had friends, but none close enough to fight with. Besides, my parents fought so much that I became a chronic peace maker.

Peace Maker

Like many of my classmates at a Passaic High School reunion I once attended, Celia has changed. As an adult it is her kindness and generosity that make it so hard for her loved ones to believe she might have ever harbored a mean let alone murderous impulse. So at thirty-one, her efforts to confirm her new insight into her role in Djuna’s death drive her to reexamine her relationship with not only her childhood friends, but also with Huck, her boyfriend of ten years, her parents and her brother. Inevitably these efforts change her relationship with her adult self and with those she loves. When she dares to face the implications and repercussions of her actions, even belatedly, she can better appreciate and understand who she has become and that may free her to change. Some of us turn to therapists to help us develop fresh insights into ourselves and bring about changes, but Celia does it pretty much alone in one harrowing week, and your account of it is filled with the suspense of a good mystery or adventure story.

Your novel is so rewarding not only because your story of a woman at a turning point in her life is inherently interesting but because you are a superb writer, reconfiguring

No Bully Zone

potent archetypes, themes, and settings to keep us pasted to each page. Like that earlier little girl in the woods en route to grandma’s, Celia and her girlfriends are both vulnerable and powerful, their eleven-year-old bodies suddenly playing host to hormones their tween brains have yet to understand. Without once using the word “bully,” you shed light on that age-old archetype too, making readers see it as complex and often subconscious behavior that it is possible to outgrow. I so appreciate your avoidance of psychobabble!

Instead, your prose approaches the poetic, making us experience with Celia the busy urban intersection where, looking at the curb, she has her revelation: “Downtown Chicago streamed around Celia in a blur of wingtips and pumps.” When you want to make clear the appeal Djuna and Celia had for the girls who sought them out, you tell us: “At any given moment Djuna and Celia were a party the others were desperate to attend, or a traffic accident too spectacular to avoid.” Your novel includes many lengthy descriptive passages detailing Celia’s hometown and the house where she grew up and where her folks still live. Had you not described these so brilliantly that they somehow conjure up the reader’s origins as well, many editors would have insisted that you shorten them. But that would have been a travesty. Celia’s relationship with her past is rooted in remembering and these specifics help her and your readers to understand what she recalls. Your use of description as a memory aid will inspire me as I tackle my next book.

Thank you for another superb novel!

Sincerely,

Jane Isenberg

Dear Gary Shteyngart,

Super Sad True Love Story

You’d think I’d be angry with you for the blast of satire that begins your novel Super Sad True Love Story and forces me to face the elegiac music heralding our nation’s abrupt decline. And I was furious, for as long as it took me to read how Lenny Abramov, your 39-year-old balding and paunchy narrator, the book-loving son of hard working Russian Jewish immigrants like your parents, knows no better than to fall for adorable 24-year-old Korean-American Eunice Park. “Eunie,” whose hobby is shopping, has an abusive father and a degree from Elderberry College where she majored in Images and minored in Assertiveness. Eunie is America’s future on steroids while Lenny is our past.

Serious Shopper

I’m grateful to you for writing this offbeat immigrant love story even though it occurs in a future that makes me fear for the eventual health and safety of my five grandchildren. How will they manage in the America you foresee where the very wealthy live forever and the rest of us die young? Where “unimportant” people are wired with electronic “äppäräts’ transmitting information about everything from their innermost thoughts to their life expectancy to anybody interested? My grandkids love printed books which, in your barely literate America are obsolete.

Even the youngest of this bubbe’s babies’ babies has learned to pay his debts or face consequences if he doesn’t. What will he make of our debt to China, so huge that the Chinese refuse to wait any longer for recompense? Of the rioting of Manhattan’s ILNWs (Individuals of Lower Net Worth) during the resulting credit crisis? Of the National Guard policing the Big Apple’s streets in tanks? And how will my sweet moppets feel when they see me and Papa and their other grandparents literally kicked to the curb as “unneeded people?”

I forgave you for making me face America’s grim future when I got hooked on Lenny’s narrative voice as he shares his diary with us. I’ve written a novel partly told by an

Diary

immigrant Jewish diarist, so I know well the pitfalls an author risks by creating the sort of person driven to chronicle her/his travails and then letting that genie out of the bottle to narrate that author’s precious novel. But you knew what you were doing. Lenny’s very schlubiness makes him easy to identify with and credible too. A guy who admits right off the bat to being a balding, middle-aged man of average height and above average bmi, is both familiar and believable to me. Lenny’s message may be threatening, but as a messenger, he himself is not.

Middle Aged Guy

How could I be scared by a guy who elaborates on how “unnoticeable” he is? He tells us that to get the attention of the “upper society” clients he solicits for his employer, a corporation claiming to extend indefinitely the life and youth of these well-heeled clients, he “must first fire a flaming arrow into a dancing moose or be kicked in the testicles by a head of state.” Lenny is not only a reliable and unthreatening narrator, but a funny one. So when he falls hopelessly in love with a totally inappropriate woman, I’m further disarmed. His doomed romance with Eunice does indeed make for a super sad true love story.

Or Lenny is a Hamlet for our youth-obsessed and health-fetishizing times, literally deciding not to be, not to prolong his youth and forestall his death by undergoing the treatments his company hawks. Rather he opts to exist as a mortal, a regular human who will die when his time is up. It

Snake on a Forked Stick

takes guts to embrace life which is, after all, often sad and always terminal. I am reminded of our inescapable mortality by the reams of paper that arrive in my snail mailbox every day. These missives are pleas for me to subscribe to publications endorsed by prestigious university medical schools and purport to be able to help me ward off disease and the effects of aging. There is even one promising to advise me on which modern medications are the “worst.”  These envelopes nest in my mailbox like serpents, ready to strike so their venom can activate my worst fears. It is with an imaginary forked stick that I carry these poisonous pamphlets into our garage and drop them unopened in the recycling bin. When virtual versions of these same serpents slither onto my computer screen, I delete them. I have nothing at all against modern medicine, but, like Lenny, I do not want to make a lifestyle limited to self-maintenance and the hopeless pursuit of longevity and immortality.

Super Sad True Love Story might well be titled Super Sad True Love Stories because Lenny and Eunice’s romance is not the only one you relate. You also tell of the immigrant’s love for his adopted nation and his disappointment when the safe and happy harbor that is America self-destructs and so becomes just another place to flee. Thank you for a powerful read that will stay with me as I struggle to write my own version of what happens when the melting pot that is America boils over.

Sincerely,

Jane Isenberg

Dear Bruce Holbert,

Lonesome Animals

I want to become a western writer which is, I think, different from a writer of westerns. I’m an urban East Coast transplant to Western Washington with a story I want to tell set in the area around present day Yakima. To tell my tale, I have to learn about Eastern Washington as it was,  imagine how its past figures in its present and then imagine how together, past and present influence people there. Only then will I be able to imagine how area inhabitants will behave in the story I aim to write. All this imagining is easier for me if I get some help from other writers who have experienced Eastern Washington firsthand. So when Seattle Times reviewer Adam Woog listed your new novel Lonesome Animals set in the Okanogan region as one of the best mysteries of 2012  and mentioned that East of the Cascades your own roots tunnel down deep and that your novel’s protagonist is based on your great grandfather, I read your book.

As a timid retired English prof who eschews violence on paper, film, and in real life, I’m an unlikely fan of your grisly story.  But even though, or maybe

Grand Coulee Dam

even because, your protagonist, retired Sheriff Russell Strawl, fits my definition of a psychopath, I kept turning the pages. And even though the bleak mountainous Okanogan landscape of the Depression Era where Strawl tracks his quarry is short on tourist attractions except for the Coulee Dam going up, I read on. It was more than just the suspense of a manhunt or even your powerful prose that held me captive. It was the westerness of Strawl, his story, and its setting. This westerness is what kept me up late to finish it in spite of the evisceration, flaying, and filleting of living people that you describe with the predictable frequency of Austen recounting house parties at the manor. I kept trying to figure out what defined this pervasive sense of westerness.

Roy Rogers and Trigger

Strawl is a far cry from the western hero I grew up watching in the movies, the laconic cowboy in a white hat who outguns the bad guy, rescues the woman, and gallops off into the wide open spaces with her behind him on his white horse. In fact, you announce in your first sentence that this “strong silent man of the West” is a myth. Instead Strawl is a badass whose loveless childhood and violent career have made him a monstrous loner incapable of sustaining family life or any other social life either. His brains and toughness are both feared and venerated even when he hurts innocent people. You explain that men of the vast and still Okanogan country only appear laconic because the silence around them drives them into constant conversation with themselves, so they perceive a greeting or comment as “the jar of another’s words pouring into the torrent of their own.”

When I read that, I thought I might identify with your protagonist because I talk to myself all the time and have since I was a lonely only child. But I’m delighted to be interrupted and have never been accused of being laconic. I don’t identify with Strawl. I don’t even like him. But I admire his smarts and his “western” skill set: horseback riding, camping, shooting, hunting, and easy familiarity with the native flora and fauna.  And because my Yakima-set novel will include several nasty types, and because I’ve never created a protagonist I didn’t like and identify with, Russell Strawl, almost a caricature of a sociopath, is instructive.

Rural swaths of Washington State attract folks who, like him, are looking to lose themselves. But the territory Strawl lives in and polices is changing and its wide open spaces are fewer and farther apart. The Coulee River is being damned and the native tribes are retreating to smaller and more remote allotments of land. Religious zealots of all sorts are turning up along with loonies, eccentrics, and survivalists. And these disparate folks mingle with decidedly disastrous results. Strawl adopts an Indian boy who, upon exposure to Catholicism, becomes a self-anointed prophet attracting followers into a mountain encampment that makes Waco, TX look like a Zen spa. Just as the dam subdues the Coulee, cars, trains, and trucks replace horses, and towns form where once there was only a settler or two. Thanks in part to Manifest Destiny, Strawl’s territory, like Huck Finn’s, is “getting civilized.”

Or maybe not so much. In 2003, shortly after I moved here, I heard Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske speak. He was touting the low homicide rate in Seattle compared to the higher rate in the countryside. Extending his arm and pointing, he said, “But out there it’s still the wild, wild West.” Maybe this westerness that I seek to understand and define has more to do with ambivalence towards encroaching “civilization” and the crowds and complexity it brings to those wide open spaces revered by so many early Americans. Maybe the promise of freedom inherent in Manifest Destiny was false. Maybe real westerners see dams and other promises of “progress” as enemies of their freedom which thrives in the wild and resists taming. After reading your gripping and scary story, I have a better idea of what Chief Kerlikowske meant and of how to think about Eastern Washington where urban gang bangers now scrap over turf with skinheads, Aryan Brothers, Native Americans, winery owners, retirees, survivalists, immigrants, farmers, religious folks of all stripes and not many more sheriff’s deputies than policed the vast area in Strawl’s day.  Thanks to Lonesome Animals, I feel better prepared to start writing my own version of a western.

Sincerely,

Jane Isenberg

Dear Henry James,

The Turn of the Screw

Now I’m grateful to you for writing The Turn of the Screw, but I didn’t really understand it the first time I read your short scary novel.  That was way back in

Haunted Manor House

1959 when I was a freshman at Vassar taking English 105 and your creepy ghost story was on the syllabus. I remember reading of an aging governess who recounts how, when young, she was charged with the care and education of Dora and Miles, two adorable orphaned children living in a manor house in rural England. This desolate place makes Thornfield where Jane Eyre was posted seem a hotbed of mirth and festivity.

In 1959 I immediately identified with the governess who, like me, was young, inexperienced, and away from home. She is also under-appreciated by her handsome, wealthy, sophisticated employer. To her dismay, he literally wants nothing to do with her or her charges and refuses to reveal how their previous governess died. So when the new governess claims to see malevolent ghosts of former servants, I felt really sorry for her. Even though I didn’t believe in ghosts, I trusted her, so I assumed the former caregiver and her consort had returned and wished to frighten away the replacement nanny so they could be alone once again with the children. In other words, like most of my classmates, I was fully convinced that the narrator saw what she said she did.

Ghosts

I’ve always been credulous. When I was six, my father, who usually ranted against all things sugary, told me we were making a visit to a candy factory, and I believed him. I still remember how I screamed and struggled when I found myself in our doctor’s office with an ether-soaked cloth over my face. I awakened at home, my throat sore and my tonsils gone. Two decades later when someone phoned alleging to be a doctoral student in Yale’s school of Psychology surveying people about their sex lives for his dissertation, I carefully and fully answered his many questions.  Only after my husband informed me that there was no Yale School of Psychology and chastised me for my gullibility did I realize I’d been hoodwinked.

I swallowed whole just about everything I read, including the governess’s recollections as recounted in The Turn of the Screw. But when my class met, our professor introduced us to the possibility that the narrator, the governess herself, was unreliable, was maybe even crazy. Who knew? What a revelation! The idea that you, a highly respected author, would deliberately devise a narrator who twisted the truth shocked me as had my realization of my father’s perfidy and the lies of the “doctoral student” asking all those personal questions. After class I hurried back to the dorm and reread your book, noting the clues Professor McGrew mentioned and finding a few on my own. Reading so actively engaged my imagination in a new way. I felt I was inside the novel, not merely observing it unfold. Suddenly your “ghost story” became a psychological thriller and/or a case study of a disturbed young woman living in a time not overly kind to lovelorn working class girls.

The ghost of your governess haunts me still, so I decided to include an unreliable narrator in The Bones and the Book.  Aliza, a long-dead diarist writes her own story in her diary and Rachel Mazursky translates it from Yiddish to English. When she finds missing pages and realizes that Aliza hoped her children would one day read what she wrote, Rachel wonders exactly how honest Aliza’s account of her life really is. This adds a whole other layer to the characters of both the diarist and the translator.

It doesn’t surprise me that The Turn of the Screw has been made into a play, movies, TV dramas, and an opera and that it retains its place on syllabi. It’s a winner and

Turn of the Screw Movie

reading it changed the way I read everything else. Now when I begin to read a new book, I ask myself, “Who’s telling the story? Can I trust her/him?”  Not all readers agree that the governess is delusional and has gone over to the dark side herself, but this interpretation satisfies me and fills me with admiration for your layering and complex characterization. You gave new life to the ghost story. Thank you.

Sincerely,

Jane Isenberg

Dear Maria Semple,

Where’d You Go Bernadette?

Where’d You Go, Bernadette? made me laugh very hard which, at my age often invites involuntary bladder participation, so I didn’t read it on the bus or in

Pill Popper’s To-Do List

any other public place where I might embarrass myself. But I loved it and am writing to thank you for it.

Reviewers call your tale a “multi-media” novel because it’s comprised of assorted documents including report cards, legal papers, e-mails, medical reports, blog posts, bills, letters, and magazine articles. You tied these together through your gifted 14-year-old narrator Bee Branch who recounts coming of age while Bernadette, her devoted mother, an introverted, narcissistic, agoraphobic, pill-popping architectural genius, comes apart and then pulls herself together. These two live with Elgin Branch, Bee’s dad and Bernadette’s husband, in Seattle where “Elgie” heads a key project at Microsoft.

Windows Icon

Inspired by Bel Kaufman whose Up the Down Staircase is one of my favorite “multi-media” novels, I wrote my very first mystery, The “M” Word,  in the early Nineties as a compilation of e-mails, faxes, student compositions and other documents crucial to the life of narrator Bel Barrett, a menopausal community college English prof. But my editor felt that mystery readers weren’t up to the “challenge” of a multi-media approach. She insisted that I revise, limiting the documents to a brief e-mail at the start of each chapter. So I’m delighted to see that your editors have more faith in your readership! As one of your readers, I love the multiplicity of voices and perspectives you share. In The Bones and the Book, I use two voices, a diarist’s and another first person narrator’s. Doing so was exciting, especially since one is translating the other and they live in two different time periods. Where’d You Go, Bernadette? has inspired me to use this approach again.

I especially love Bernadette’s wild rants when she skewers Seattle. As a relative newcomer to the Puget Sound area, I also recall shivering in the region’s notorious coolness to strangers, “the Seattle Freeze,” that Bernadette remarks on. I live in Issaquah, but I get the Seattle scene and appreciate Bernadette’s satirical descriptions of the Emerald City’s fashion statements, hair styles (“gray hair and long gray hair”), weather (gray),

Gray Cloud over Seattle

conversational gambits (weather), traffic issues, obsessional branding, street people, and proximity to both Idaho (Idaho?) and Canada. As a parent, grandparent, and retired teacher, I also get her send up of schools suffering from extreme progressivism. And I recognize Microsoft where “Elgie,” a TEDtalk star, reigns over a kingdom of free candy machines, cubes, and clocks counting the hours until the next product ships.

Take Out

But your story is hardly one long giggle. At its heart is a troubled woman, an inventive iconoclast, who makes a few mistakes early on that are compounded by a series of miscarriages and the fact that Bee is born with a defective heart requiring many surgeries to correct. Bernadette suffers a kind of twenty-year-long breakdown that does not prevent her from being a devoted mom but does prevent her from being an effective architect, homemaker, parent volunteer, and neighbor. In fact, her state of mind and inability to relate to anyone besides Bee prevent her from doing very much, so her family survives on take-out and Bernadette secretly outsources all errands, domestic chores, bill paying, and travel planning to a virtual assistant in India! (Who doesn’t occasionally have the urge to do that?)

Bernadette’s misery and social ineptness keep getting her and those around her into serious trouble so that her constant catastrophizing is not

Blackberry Vine

without basis. I’ve been known to catastrophize a bit myself, so I identify with Bernadette’s anxiety about travel and socializing although neither of these activities triggers my terror. I noted with interest that the ills that actually befall Bernadette are not the ones she worries about. For example she’s terrified of experiencing sea sickness on a family trip to Antarctica but, when she gets to sea, she proves quite functional. “Safe” at home, however, her handling of the invasive blackberry vines wreaks havoc on her next-door neighbors, literally rendering the hapless family homeless, ruining a school fundraiser, and scaring lots of little kids. So beneath the hilarious satire of Seattle’s culture and the up-to-the-minuteness of this book is the familiar story of a brilliant but flawed woman struggling to be worker, wife, and mom all at once when none of these realms is going well.

Thanks for a wonderful read.

Sincerely,

Jane Isenberg

Dear Blog Readers,

My Cervical Collar

I promised to resume posting notes to my muses in January when I finished promoting The Bones and the Book, so what happened?  Would you believe me if I told you I broke my neck? I did. Early on the morning of November 29, I fell and fractured two cervical vertebrae. Since then I’ve been wearing a neck brace designed by the guy who dreamed up the costumes for Star Wars.

This mishap did more than scare the hell out of me; it interrupted my efforts to promote The Bones and the Book.  It also prevented me from typing more than a line or two even after my daughter jerry-rigged the monitor to accommodate my immobile head. After a few minutes at the keyboard and mouse, my right shoulder and back felt as if an elephant was sitting on them. But I’m feeling a lot better now. And I can type a little longer without a visit from the elephant.

Sitting Elephant

While my fingers have been idle and my bones knitting, I’ve met new muses/authors and revisited old ones, and you can expect a note to one of them soon. Meanwhile, thanks for your patience and your interest.

Sincerely,

Jane Isenberg

Dear Blog Readers,

The Bones and the Book

This fall finds me in bookstores and libraries talking about The Bones and the Book.  When I’m not actually visiting a bookstore or library, I’m arranging to do so. So I’ll be taking a break from posting notes to my muses until the New Year.

Meanwhile I hope that you’ll read The Bones and the Book. There’s a synopsis of it, some comments from reviewers, and info about how and where to order it on my web site (www.JaneIsenberg.com). If you live in the Puget Sound area, you’ll also find there a list of venues where I’ll be speaking and or signing.

Thanks for following my blog. I look forward to a reunion in 2013.

Sincerely,

Jane Isenberg.

Dear Anouk Markovitz,

I Am Forbidden

Thank you for I Am Forbidden. It can’t have been easy for you, a born and raised Satmar Hasidic, to write this astonishing saga that spans 70 years and two continents, two worlds really. One is our modern world where, in an orgy of free will, we confront a myriad of choices about everything from what to

GuidingGoodChoices

eat, wear, read, and believe to what to teach our children. The other world is a medieval theocracy where a manipulative rabbi manufactures a convenient miracle and preys on the fears of his traumatized congregants to coerce them into unquestioning obedience to outdated laws. Unlike the critics who have praised I Am Forbidden for its evenhandedness, I see it as a beautifully written and imagined condemnation of the Satmar Hasidism for what amounts to fanaticism fostered by deceit, ignorance, and desperate longing for the families killed in Satmar, Hungary during WWII.  To me your novel is a poignant critique of fundamentalism.

But it’s more interesting than most such critiques because you turn to history to explain the origin and staying power of Satmar Hasidism. And you focus not only on how

Sperm

women suffer in this community, but also on how Satmar beliefs affect the intimate lives of men. You open your story during World War II in Satmar where a devout teenaged boy has a wet dream in spite of having lashed his hands and feet to the bed frame to prevent him from committing this sin. Semen is only for procreation  to speed the repopulation of this community decimated by the Nazis.  A rabbi has decreed that “He who emits seed deserves death.” Decades later this same taboo makes it sinful for another male character to have a test to determine the viability of his sperm after his wife has not conceived during ten years of marriage. Not content with supervising men’s emissions and women’s menstrual cycles, the rabbis mandate positions and sexual pleasure limiting the former to missionary and forbidding the latter.

You’re generous to your characters when they endure, indeed, demand this way of life because you show how most of them suffer from what,

today, we know as post-traumatic stress. You describe one little boy watching his toddler sister killed with a pitchfork inches from him and hearing his mother’s final screams as she too is killed. A little girl sees her pregnant mother shot down while trying to board a train and finds her father tied to a post and left to die after being tortured by the dreaded Iron Guard. It’s not surprising that these two orphans grow up desperate to believe that if they are very, very good, when the Messiah comes, they will be reunited with their pierced, shot, and castrated relatives who will be whole and healthy once again.  You don’t blame the survivors and this reader doesn’t either.

Well, I do, a little. The small girl, who never forgets watching her parents die at the hands of Jew haters, grows up in the Satmar community where her father arranges her marriage to the young man who recalls seeing his sister impaled and hearing his mother’s dying screams. In spite of the love these two have for one another and in spite of their faith, they run afoul of the regressive Satmar reproductive rules with predictably tragic results. It is not their faith in God that is the problem, but their faith in these rules. This misplaced faith is a kind of mass delusion brought about by the trauma of seeing their parents and community cruelly annihilated. This delusion flourishes in mandated ignorance and fears of modernity and masquerades as faith in God. The Satmar are like children who seek safety under the bed while their house burns down around them. If they don’t look at the fire, it cannot destroy them.

Another of your characters, the young daughter of the nocturnal emitter, suffers a brutal beating from her father, now a rabbi himself, for riding a bicycle on the Sabbath.

Whip

Not surprisingly she grows up to question rabbinic authority, to read forbidden books, and, when she reaches marriageable age, to leave her home, family, and the Satmar community in Paris for the United States. Here she goes to college and becomes a film maker and professor living alone in a New York studio apartment and a country home. Does she miss her family? Yes. Would she return is she were allowed? No. Can she live a rewarding and meaningful life estranged from her family of origin and childless and, perhaps, manless as well? Yes.

It’s scary to think of an entire community of PTSD sufferers just across the bridge from Manhattan and determined to remain separate from the evil influences they think are rampant only in the outside world. At a time when globalization, scientific breakthroughs, climate change, and wars waged in the name of religion are changing the way we all live, these people’s muddled medievalism is ill-timed and even dangerous. Like many other fundamentalists, the Satmar Hasids seem ill-equipped for life in the diverse democracy that took them in. I admire the courage you show in taking readers into the hearts and minds of the Satmar and then taking us out again. You make that journey memorable.

Firecracker Exploding

There is a lengthy, complicated tale I want to tell, and in I Am Forbidden you show me how to make a long, complex story quick and explosive like a firecracker going off in the reader’s head. Thank you!

Sincerely,

Jane Isenberg

Dear Amanda Coplin,

The Orchardist

I read The Orchardist because I, too, plan to set a novel in eastern Washington. But unlike you who were raised there, I’ve been there only twice years ago,

Nez Perce Warrior

to visit my daughter at WASU in Spokane. I figured your book would give me a quick tour of the sunny side of my new state before I visit there again. But I got a lot more than I bargained for, and I’m very grateful. Your gripping tale of Talmadge, an orphaned orchardist doomed to mourn his sister Elsbeth who disappears when they are both children took me to a time and place tourists no longer get to visit. Talmadge lives on alone in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains at the turn of the last century. His only visitors are some Nez Perce men who hunt wild horses in the mountains and come each fall to help Talmadge harvest his fruit.

His solitude is disturbed when Jane and Della, two very young, very pregnant, very hungry girls, appear on his property. Their backstory complements Talmadge’s own, and you weave these entangling tales into a gripping narrative which they tell one another only in broken snatches reluctantly shared. These are not chatty people. So yours is partly a story about stories, about controlling narrative, sharing, or not sharing family secrets. You use no quotation marks to indicate where characters do actually speak aloud, perhaps because they do so rarely. Elsbeth has trouble putting her thoughts into full sentences. Cle, a leader of the Nez Perce, stops speaking altogether when his mother is snatched from their tepee by white raiders. Della barely speaks. Even a character’s internal monologues are terse as in “Why are we born?”

Secrets

These are not people of the book, the café, or the salon; they are people of the earth, the forest, and the mountains. Homely, humble, patient, quiet, protective, and content with small pleasures, Talmadge himself seems an unlikely hero. He’s a kind man, an excellent orchardist, and, perhaps, a tragic figure, for he fails in imagination. With a bit more imagination, he might have predicted Della’s behavior more accurately. But maybe not. The local herbalist and midwife Carolyn Middey, a more communicative and worldly character, appears better attuned to the potential for disaster lurking in the many silences in Talmadge’s household. Talmadge, Middey, Cle, Jane, Della, and Jane’s child form a family marked by the blood of birth and the knowledge of death, but a kinship nonetheless.

Apples on the Tree

Talmadge’s mother wanted him to know life on the land was hard and his life certainly is. But it is not without deep pleasures: the joy of hard

Forest and Mountains

work, discovery, and omnipresent beauty. The orchard, surrounding forest, nearby canyons, creek, and mountains are glorious and your prose does them justice. “Then they came through dense forest, and stood on the rim of a valley illuminated as if it was the end or beginning of the world. A valley of yellow grass. Still but for a ribbon of water moving at the bottom of it.”  The characters savor the smells, sounds, and colors around them all the time. When they are in town, they miss the fecund loveliness of the orchard. They lose or find themselves in the forest. Cle and his men materialize from it and Elsbeth literally loses herself there. Jane and Della hide there and Della often chooses to sleep in the woods rather than in the house or the lumber camps where she finds work. When Cle and his band of horse hunters emerge from the woods with their snorting, stomping unbroken herd they seem like vestiges of a forgotten time when wild creatures roamed unfenced peaks and Native Americans, also unfenced, hunted them.

Thanks for this moving and powerful book. I will see eastern Washington more clearly because I have read it.

Sincerely,

Jane Isenberg

Dear Cynthia Ozick,

The Puttermesser Papers

My favorite of your many books is your surreal novel The Puttermesser Papers. I’m dazzled by how you draw on a Jewish legend born of terror and use it to satirize urban politics, politicians, bureaucracies, and bigots. You use this legend to allow a brainy, nebbishy Jewish single woman in her late forties to enjoy a short-lived but fulfilling triumph. Ruth Puttermesser, an overqualified and underappreciated municipal bureaucrat, returns to her dreary apartment to find the potting soil that sustained her houseplants scattered all over the floor. Instead of reaching for the broom and dustpan, your Puttermesser, whose

Woman Molding Clay

name translates from Yiddish as butter knife, is driven to shape this dirt into a large female form that turns out to be a golem, a fantastic animated super heroine. According to legend, a rabbi in medieval Prague once sculpted clay into a huge male figure, a golem, to protect the city’s Jews. It is Puttermesser’s creation that helps her  run for and be elected Mayor of New York and enables her to transform Gomorrah into Gotham, a functioning, litterless metropolis whose citizens enjoy civility and comfort that even Michael Bloomberg can only imagine.

Not content to perk up your protagonist with a few well-chosen adjectives, a leg up the career ladder, or a sortie into genre fiction, you give Puttermesser a girl golem and make her mayor of New York! So thanks to your authorial daring and knowledge of Jewish history, she morphs into both mother and mayor. I’m embarrassed to confess that until I read The Puttermesser Papers in my late forties, I knew nothing about golems. Your insistence on drawing on and explicating this chunk of our long and troubled past reveals its richness while instructing those who, like me, are ignorant of it.

Golem and Woman

I love reading about Puttermesser’s transformation at least partly because it’s funny. Xanthippe, as Puttermesser dubs her new, oversized offspring, is a shopaholic, a glutton, and a sex addict who exhausts all the men in Mayor Puttermesser’s administration with her urgent demands.  The chapter of this five-part novel devoted to Xanthippe is truly comic, even when Puttermesser must destroy the libidinous golem who has run amok as golems are wont to do and threatens the new civic paradise that is Puttermesser’s great achievement.

Like your Puttermesser, in the Eighties I was a midlife single Jewish woman living in the metropolitan area and working in a corrupt Kafakesque bureaucracy. And like you, I was writing a book about a smart midlife single Jewish woman living in the metropolitan area and working in a corrupt Kafkaesque bureaucracy. So I was struck by your depiction of poor Puttermesser as a bit on the schlumpy side and suffering from hyper literacy and loneliness. And I was saddened when she ended up victim of a brutal killer rather than as the one who brings such predators to justice.

Breck Shampoo Poster

I identify with her. I grew up in the Forties and Fifties when rhinoplasty was a routine ritual for Jewish girls whose well-meaning parents wanted us to assimilate. My mother persuaded me to undergo a nose job by insisting that “no one will marry you with that nose. It’s too Jewish.” She also bought hair straightener to tame my brown kinky tresses. Puttermesser and I shared certain features.  She too had “… a Jewish face and a modicum of American distrust of it. She resembled no poster she had ever seen: she hated the Breck shampoo girl, so blond and bland and pale-mouthed; she boycotted Breck because of the golden-haired posters, all crudely idealized, an American wet dream, in the subway.” Puttermesser’s hair, brown like mine, “came in bouncing scallops” like “imbricated roofing tiles . . . .”  Apt references and wry descriptive gems like these gleam throughout your novel. Decades later Puttermesser’s antipathy towards those poster-ready girls born blond with short straight American noses still resonates with me even though I have long since forgiven them and my mother too.

Inspired by you, I’ve turned to Jewish history to write The Bones and the Book. But I have not yet put upon the page a character capable of creating a golem or doing something else that transcends reality so wonderfully. I still aspire to do so and have set the ingredients to boil in my head. All I need now is the guts to stir the pot. Before I begin to write that novel, I’ll revisit yours to find the courage I need. Thank you for your example.

Sincerely,

Jane Isenberg

Dear Robert B. Parker,

Hugger Mugger

Boston-based hunk Spenser is your gift to wise-asses and, as a certified wise-ass myself, I’m grateful. He’s the only noir private eye who can on some

occasions be mistaken for the proverbial teddy bear

Teddy Bear

while at other times come off like a tough Hemingway hero channeling Jon Stewart.

Jon Stewart

In Hugger Mugger, Spenser leaves Boston and Cambridge for horse country in Georgia and tracks down a killer there with the help of the local cops. Upon meeting a room full of perfectly tanned southerners, our tourist from New England confides to the reader, “If I were a skin cancer specialist, I’d move right down here.” But like Stewart, Spenser is more than a smart-ass. He’s a top notch PI and a loyal and loving partner to Susan Silverman, his shrink girlfriend. He’s an intellectual who loves sports, a trusted friend, and a good cook too. In other words, you’ve given mystery lovers, feminists, and foodies of both genders a male protagonist we can root for and admire.

That’s all well and good but, as I mentioned, what I’ve always enjoyed most about Spenser is how snide and ironic he is. Since I was a teenager, I’ve used sarcasm as a shield,

Wise-ass

a sword, and a feather to tickle the ribs of students and friends. But sarcasm has definite limits, especially in the classroom where I spent about forty years teaching English. Although I could use irony to illustrate certain literary works ─How do you suppose Lear/Huck/Holden/Magwich felt on Father’s Day?─ skewering my students on the sharp rapier of my wit was not an option. Besides, many of them hailed from other countries, and my snarky comments didn’t often translate into foreign languages or apply to different cultures. My censored inner wise-ass yearned for an outlet until I gave my menopausal sleuth Bel Barrett an acid-tipped tongue. I thought of her as like Spenser with hot flashes, and I had a lot of fun writing in her sarcastic voice, one very close to my own.

In most of your books, Spenser does his detecting on his familiar home turf along the banks of Boston’s Charles River. There he knows the streets

Boston Map

and alleys, the political players and the police, the cafés, the colleges, and the criminals. There he makes his home near his beloved Susan’s. (A man eager to learn how to behave in an egalitarian relationship with a well-educated and attractive professional woman would do well to use Spenser as a model. ) In Boston Spenser has his trusty sidekick Hawk to watch his back as in Double Deuce, a terrific tale of gangs and guns and friendship. You are a master at creating credible settings and intriguing supporting characters.

Another thing I admire about your books is that they are mostly dialogue. You let Spenser tell his story in the first person and he recounts his conversations with colleagues, clients, and friends. Remember this chat he had in the coffee shop with Becker, the local lawman who is his ally in Hugger Mugger?

“Fella outside sitting in his car with the motor running,” Becker said. “Know about him?”

“Yeah. He’s been assigned by Security South to follow me.”

“And by luck you happened to spot him?” Becker said.

“They could have tailed me with a walrus, “I said, “and been better off.”

Spenser’s wit enlivens what without it would be a quick but colorless exchange in the noir tradition.

Yet another thing I find appealing about Spenser as narrator is that he tells us exactly what every character, no matter how insignificant, is wearing and eating!

Breakfast

These details, often amusingly rendered, make Spenser’s account visible to the reader and help us to judge your fictional characters as we often do real ones, by what they wear and what they eat. Whoever designed the costumes for the long-running TV show based on your Spenser novels had only to turn your explicit descriptions into clothes, shoes, and accessories. And, of course, Spenser’s attention to such details, often enables him to figure out who done it.

Thank you for your many highly entertaining novels that have also served this smart-ass as models of story-telling.

Sincerely,

Jane Isenberg

Dear P.D. James,

Cover Her Face

I’ve recently attended my fiftieth Vassar reunion, an occasion designed to recall memories of 1962 when life waited like an exquisitely wrapped wedding

Reunion!

gift I just knew held something special. At a pre-reunion get-together our hostess got out the obligatory yearbook, and we passed it around, marveling at the fresh-faced girls we’d been. After I relinquished the book, I glanced at my old friends clustered around the coffee table. In that second, I saw us as we’d been five decades ago, our faces yet unmarked by experience, wisdom, or time. Not surprisingly we spent much of the weekend reliving what life was really like for young women in 1962, so it’s no wonder that when I returned home, I sought out my copy of your very first mystery, Cover Her Face, which came out that year.

Wedding Gift

Unwed Mother

You really nailed 1962. In this novel, you dramatize people’s ambivalence about the social changes sweeping England and America. The victim, housemaid Sally Judd, is thought to be an unwed mother and she is not the only woman indulging in premarital sex. Sally’s announcement of her engagement to the son of the landed Maxie family for whom she works heralds class co-mingling of the sort that became more common during the Sixties. Sally herself, described by a former employer as “Pretty, intelligent, ambitious, sly, and insecure” was also something of a drama queen with a penchant for embarrassing the powerful. In the end, it is this leaning that puts her in harm’s way. In fact, it puts her in the path of another woman equally bent on keeping power in the hands of the gentry where it had always been. And so, we end with a young woman dead and an older one going to prison.

The good news for women in Cover Her Face is the realization of loyal and sensible nurse Catherine Bower that she’d rather be single than continue her

Nurse

dubious relationship with the callow Stephen Maxie. For a woman in an English novel to turn away a suitor was still a revolutionary act, more like Brontë’s Jane Eyre than Austen’s Lydia Bennett. But the not very pretty Catherine is a new woman. She has a profession and doesn’t need to tie herself to a loser to live comfortably. And you do reward her with a worthier liaison later on. Cover Her Face is full of well-drawn characters who reflect their time and place very convincingly.

So my post-reunion return to the early 1960s was more than facilitated by revisiting your debut novel. And so was my need to lose myself in a good mystery, a book that would take me far from health concerns, news of our sad world, and my obligations to e-mail and Facebook. In Cover Her Face, you offer a puzzle worthy of Dame Agatha. And to help us solve it, you introduce Scotland Yard’s Detective Chief-Inspector Adam Dalgleish. He is a “tall, dark, and handsome” man who looks before he speaks, views the body and the crime scene before interviewing the family, and is known for his “ruthless” and “unorthodox” approach to bringing criminals to justice. He proved to be a keeper, and I followed his career and personal life with interest in subsequent books. And I followed your career too as you continued to fill your books with issues and characters emblematic of the changing times.

Time to Be in Earnest

Your socially relevant and carefully crafted novels inspire me as I dream up mysteries of my own. And your life as you recall it in Time to Be in Earnest

Working Mom

inspires me as well. For, like me, you were a working mom who came to writing later in life with a healthy respect for genre fiction. And you are still writing today! Bravo, Baroness and thank you!

Sincerely,

Jane Isenberg

Dear Anna Quindlen,

Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake

I just finished your memoir Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, and, of course, I loved it. I’ve always relished the way you draw on your own experiences,

Sandwich Generation

strewing your New York Times columns with first-person pronouns: “That’s what makes life so hard for women, that instead of thinking that this is the way things are, we always think it’s the way we are.” I still savor the sharp images you use. A passing jet is “a shining exclamation point in the blue sky” and women sandwiched between nurturing kids and nursing aging parents are “caregivers cubed.” Reading your personal and poignant prose once again took me back to my first encounter with your columns in the early Eighties.

NYT Logo

The New York Times seemed austere, dense, a paper for corporate types and lawyers to peruse over leisurely wife-made breakfasts. A working mom, I seldom had time to skim the front page of my local paper before leaving my kids’ egg-crusted

Man Reading Paper over Coffee

dishes on the table and tearing off to teach my community college classes. Then a female colleague recommended your column, so I read it. To my amazement, it was actually about stuff that interested me, “women’s stuff” like grocery shopping with kids, the amniocentesis dilemma, and working from home with a toddler drooling on your lap and an infant waking from a nap. I recalled a time when my comments on the student essays I read at home were punctuated by yogurt splotches when I returned them to their authors. Who knew this detail of my messy double life mattered? You did. You taught me that certain issues that mattered to me, what we now call “women’s issues,” were actually newsworthy, New York Times-worthy. Thanks to you, when menopause hit, I knew this daunting passage mattered, and I wrote a series of mysteries featuring Bel Barrett, a Kegeling, sweating amateur sleuth who tracks killers in between mood swings.

There’s more to my affinity for your memoir than my appreciation of your style and subject matter though. Your unashamed membership in the middle

Rest in Peace Middle Class

class is both refreshing and validating. In an era of victim-lit, your references to your comfortable, albeit not opulent childhood during which you were neither abused nor addicted is a relief. Your mother’s illness and death saddened you but did not destroy you and neither did being the oldest of five sibs. You went to college, married a lawyer, got several great jobs, had children, and found a way to stay home with them and still write. None of this sounds like gripping memoir-fodder, but it is when you put it out there and describe what you learned from your relatively untroubled life. In Lots of Candles, you refer to your good fortune unabashedly each time you mention your healthy kids, your happy marriage, your two homes, and, of course, your extremely rewarding work. As a result of that work, you,  a woman and a writer, both traditionally underpaid, are able to retain your place among the middle class, a cohort vanishing even as I type. Kudos and thank you for your game-changing columns, your inspiring memoir, and your engrossing novels.

Sincerely,

Jane Isenberg.

Dear Allegra Goodman,

The Cookbook Collector

I finished reading The Cookbook Collector on the eve of Facebook’s IPO. Normally the workings of the stock market and its boy wonders barely graze the

Irene Rosenfeld, CEO of Kraft Foods

underbelly of my radar. But in your stunning novel, you took me on a dramatic and accessible tour through the tail end of the Nineties’dot.com heyday. Better yet, one of the best, brightest, and most bent on success CEOs is actually wonder woman, Emily Bach, MBA. If that weren’t reward enough for this feminist, by your story’s end, Emily turns out to be a Jewish woman!

Also making news while I was reading The Cookbook Collector was the ongoing struggle of book publishers and independent book sellers to remain relevant and profitable enough to stay in business even as self-publishing and monopolization threaten to displace them. But in your novel, old print books are highly prized items, sought after by the retired Microsoft millionaire, antiquarian bookstore owner George Friedman.

Old Cookbook

Rare old books also intrigue the grad student who works for him, Emily Bach’s younger sister Jess. You see to it that each sister has a love affair born in the context of her work. Emily is engaged to another ambitious and highly competitive dot.com CEO who turns out to be traitorous and whom you severely punish. But you reward Jess and George when they fall in love, their relationship nourished by the beautiful well-used cookbooks they explore. Admittedly biased by the fact that I’m a writer, I interpreted their lovely wedding as your endorsement of books over bucks. Bravo!

Rain

So how do you make a novel about business into a literary triumph and a page turner? It’s partly your scope which is broad enough to include not only the dot com bubble, the events and aftermath of 9/11, two love stories, and a few Bialystok Jews and environmentalists, but it’s also your prose and pacing. You layer precise and often wryly comic insights and images in such a way as to repeat important themes without seeming repetitive. In your opening paragraph you violate the rule cautioning writers not to begin their novels with descriptions of the weather by describing a September rainstorm in Silicon Valley. After a brief lovely word picture of the storm, you add, “Like money the rain came in a rush, enveloping the bay, delighting forecasters, exceeding expectations, charging the air.” The two words, Like money turn your initial paragraph from a beautifully phrased weather report to a reminder of the rush of the quick buck and how, like rain, money can stop coming and give way to devastating drought.  This comparison, unexpected itself, also reminded this reader of the danger of unrealistic expectations. After reading this one crucial paragraph, I was eager to meet the characters who people a world where money rains down and then, perhaps, dries up. And you keep up the pace, firing big ideas at us in few well-chosen words and encapsulating big moments in swift-moving prose-poetry.

Kaaterskill Falls

The Family Markowitz

I look to your books for inspiration and I find it in this novel just as I found it in The Family Markowitz and Kaaterskill Falls. Those two very good earlier works of yours

legitimized my urge to someday write a book centered on specifically Jewish themes and characters. They were among the novels that moved me to write The Bones and the Book.  But The Cookbook Collector becomes an overtly “Jewish novel” only near the end when Emily and Jess discover that their long dead mother was Jewish. This unexpected plot twist illustrates how a writer can integrate Jewish characters and themes into stories that, like modern American Jews, have finally escaped ghettos and restricted neighborhoods and now turn up almost everywhere.

I also appreciate your affectionate and empathic treatment of the Bialystok Jews whom you might have satirized for their messianic zeal, gender bias, and old fashioned get-ups. But instead you focus on their talent for community building and ancestral memory, not to mention fund raising. For it is the Bialystok rabbi who makes his initial investment, not in the market but in Jess, a human being who needs a loan. I found it extremely ironic that his relatively small investment of $1,800, a meaning-laden number in the Jewish tradition, pays off not only spiritually, but financially as well.

The Cookbook Collector is a wonderful read and has already broadened the scope of my next book. Again, bravo and thank you.

Sincerely,

Jane Isenberg

Dear Deborah Feldman,

Unorthodox

Oy vey! That’s what I kept exclaiming as I read your moving memoir Unorthodox: The Scandalous Story of My Rejection of My Hasidic Roots. Thank you for having the guts and persistence to get it published. Remember how you had to hide books under your bed or in your underwear drawer because

Girl Reading Max Hendrick Sketch

Hasidic girls aren’t supposed to read anything but their prayer books? Well, Ms. Feldman, I bet many of those girls are now stashing copies of Unorthodox under their beds or burrowing them among their heavy high socks and panties. For some of these teens, unwitting hostages in a repressive and cloistered community, your memoir will be a validation of their own “unacceptable” perceptions. And for a few of these same girls it will be a road map out.

In Unorthodox, the devil really does show his medieval misogynistic face in the details. Who knew that according to the Talmud, Rachel, righteous wife of renowned Rabbi Akiva, stuck pins in her legs to prevent her skirt from billowing up and exposing those legs?

Marilyn Monroe-Skirt Billowing

Or that girls at your high school are treated to a daily “modesty lecture” where this masochistic act is cited as exemplary? Or that married women, have to prove they are no longer menstruating/“impure” by submitting numerous unstained white cloths to a rabbi for inspection? I found your detailed critique sadly instructive.

Your gift for description sneaks me into the closed world you fled. So I’m with you on that day you’re happy to be sent home from school to modify your dress: “The moment when the spring sunshine hits my face is like the taste of Zeidy’s Kiddush wine, my first breath of fresh air a long slow tingle down my throat.” And your depiction of your relationship with yourself and with God after your flight from Hasidism reads like poetry. “I have come home to myself, and God is no longer a prescription for paradise but an ally in my heart.”

Your family history needs no embellishment to be prime memoir material. Your lesbian mom left the Hasidic world without you, and your dad is developmentally disabled  and mentally ill. Being raised by your ideologue grandfather, your Holocaust-scarred grandmother, and your materialistic and controlling aunt was, at best, a poor fallback position. With no reading of books or newspapers, no TV, little contact with male age mates, and a lot of negative and erroneous information about your body, how were you supposed to be prepared to have sex let alone enjoy it? And those pre-marital sex ed sessions you endured were worse than useless. No wonder you didn’t know where your vagina was and, when your husband proved similarly clueless, no wonder there was literally no there there for either of you. Your frankly clinical account of your efforts to figure out your own body is chilling.

Hasidic Bride En Route to Wedding

In fact, a lot of what you say about life as a Williamsburg Satmar is disturbing. And seeing our stained Jewish linens billowing in the wind feeds my fear of anti-Semitism, an ongoing threat. A modern Reform Jewish feminist, I still feel guilty when writing Jewish bad guys and gals because I hear my mother’s whispered warnings sounding in my ears. Her whispers became shouts when I was writing The Bones and the Book because not all the Jews in that novel behave well. Some are downright criminal. With my dead mother kicking up such a ruckus in my head, it was very hard for me to implicate even those fictional characters, so I can only imagine how difficult it has been for you to expose the community where you grew up. But even my mother would acknowledge that, kept hidden, soiled laundry eventually reeks.

Bravo! You speak for other women rendered powerless in a community of damaged men who see women primarily as breeders and domestic servants. Inspired by you and other female Jewish authors, I’ll continue to mine our rich tradition and tell women’s versions of the stories I find there.

Sincerely,

Jane Isenberg

Dear Frances Hodgson Burnett,

The Secret Garden

I cannot remember a time when I hadn’t read and loved The Secret Garden, and decades after my mother bought it for me, your book still loomed large in

Impatiens

my consciousness. In my forties and fifties I had a garden, and although it was hardly secret, it always reminded me of the one in your book. Behind our Hoboken row house,  our yard was really more brick-paved patio than garden. But each spring I bought many flats of multicolored impatiens and devoted an entire day to planting them along the back and side borders. Along with the Rose of Sharon trees lining the other side, they created what to this city girl was a charmed circle of blooming color. There, on summer afternoons, I’d retreat to admire my handiwork, think, and read.

When I was in my mid-forties, I began having panic attacks. They followed the illnesses and deaths of my father and my first husband and the mental and physical decline of my mother. Caring for my mom while also raising two abruptly fatherless adolescents and teaching full-time depleted me. Life seemed bleak. One day my therapist told me I was a catastrophizer, a person who looks at a hangnail and foresees an amputated arm. Following that session, I retreated to my garden, seeking the safety of my familiar fenced-in cloister. That afternoon the garden reminded me not of the one you describe so memorably, but of Mary Lennox and Colin Craven, the sad, sour children you created to tend to it. An orphan and a motherless invalid, Mary and Colin are retreating from sheltered dull lives ravaged by loss, neglect, and fear. These two find refuge in your walled Eden where they are restored to physical and mental health. As a lonely only child, I’d identified with them both.

But that day in the garden with my therapist’s pronouncement echoing in my head, I recalled not only the children, but Colin’s father. Now that man was a catastrophizer! This grieving, humpbacked widower took one look at his newborn son and convinced himself that the infant had inherited the hump and was so weak and sickly that he wouldn’t live to reach adulthood. His dire predictions made my conviction that my daughter’s school trip to Greece would end in a plane crash and my son would be mugged on the subway home from school seem quite reasonable. I remembered how, treated like an invalid, Colin becomes one and terrifies himself by imagining his own imminent death. He hasn’t inherited the hump, but he has a catastrophizer’s DNA for sure. Sitting there, I recognized both Cravens as kindred spirits.

Toad in the Garden

Then I reminded myself that Colin is a kid in a kid’s book. Of course he recovers. A little fresh air, sunshine, hard work, and good company are all he needs. And his recovery prompts his father’s. But I was just a few years away from fifty. And my life wasn’t some bucolic British fairytale. My surviving parent wouldn’t recover. My life was an urban disaster and, to prove it, a huge green toad, a refugee from the local sewer system, turned up in my garden. When the local alley cats began to glide along the fence top, the visitor’s prospects seemed as grim as mine.

With the help of neighbors, I rescued the toad. I kept going to the therapist and teaching my students and seeing my kids off at airports and planting impatiens and reading in the garden. My panic attacks became less frequent, even after my mother died six months before I hit fifty. To get through that birthday , I enlisted the help of my kids who, at summer’s end, were actually safe at home. We planned a potluck in the garden and invited everybody we knew, including an interesting man I’d recently met and a new boyfriend my daughter met at her summer job. Contrary to my expectations, it didn’t rain, it wasn’t too hot, people did come, we didn’t run out of food or wine, no one suffered food poisoning or tripped over a protruding brick, and I had a wonderful time turning fifty. Soon afterwards I began to think about writing for publication.

Pot Luck Plenty!

So thank you for writing a book that spoke to me when I was an anxious little girl and then again when I was gob-smacked by midlife losses.

Sincerely,

Jane Isenberg

Dear Dame Iris Murdoch,

A Severed Head

You write so well, it’s almost criminal. One of my favorite lines in A Severed Head is on page one when, reflecting on his too-young mistress’s practical nature, Martin Lynch-Gibbons assures the reader, “Only with someone so eminently sensible could I have deceived my wife.” Thank you for A Severed Head, your farcical take on the sexual shenanigans of upper middle class Brits and Americans.

During the early Sixties and before I read A Severed Head, I saw a dramatization of it at a theater in New Haven, CT. Half a century later I remember that production. Every turn of the revolving circular stage revealed a bed occupied by a different twosome from among the play’s five characters! I minored in

Moses with the Ten Commandments

French in college, so I was no stranger to farce. But these highly theatrical couplings ranged from garden variety adultery and homosexual hanky-panky to unthinkable incest. To see people vigorously violating so many of the Commandments was more than liberating. It was hilarious! It was The Sixties! My colleague and I left that Saturday matinee performance guffawing, and I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the book.

Dead White Males

I wasn’t disappointed. Reading A Severed Head was a vacation from the stresses of introducing works by long dead white men to restive high school kids, for you were a live woman at the top of your game. It was a respite from worrying about poverty and segregation. Martin Lynch-Gibbons and his upper middle class cohort live on inherited wealth and feel entitled to do so. It was an escape from cooking, cleaning and being the “Yale wife” of my grad school husband. Antonia Lynch-Gibbons, the only wife in your book, is unencumbered by household drudgery, children, or a job, and so is free to spend her time screwing around. A Severed Head reads a bit like Updike’s Couples if that solemn tract were written by a winking female wordsmith with a British accent high on speed.

But even in this romp of a read, you include a few caveats, especially for women. The “sensible” one has an abortion and attempts suicide while Martin’s wife ages visibly and, so Martin tells us, unattractively. And then there’s Dr. Honor Klein, an anthropology prof and Jewish half-sister to Martin’s American psychiatrist and longtime friend. Martin speaks often of Honor’s “reptilian” eyes, “oily” hair, dark skin, unattractive “perceptively Jewish” features, and of something “animal-like and repellent” in her stare. These descriptions smack of anti-Semitism on your part until I remind myself that these are narrator Martin’s perceptions and Martin is an idiot. He feels entitled to betray, assault, and coerce women to do his bidding without any awareness that these actions are not right or that the pain he knows they cause matters.

In short Martin is a narrator we can’t rely on. I’d been conned by his kind before, and I relished the idea of a storyteller whom the reader can’t trust but whom the writer can

Unreliable Narrator

manipulate, adding layers of meaning and suspense to her novel. I pictured this omnipotent author creating a genie and letting him out of the bottle to do her bidding. I resolved that someday I’d conjure up my own unreliable narrator.

That day was a long time coming. But finally, in The Bones and the Book, Rachel Mazursky and Yetta Solomon constantly question the veracity of the woman whose diary Rachel is translating. And like the cynical Yetta, Rachel also has suspicions about the truth of what other people tell her. Finally, some wary readers may wonder if Rachel herself, a woman who values keeping and preserving written records of what happens, is entirely

Genie out of the Bottle!

trustworthy.

Thank you for a marvelous read and for all your other marvelous novels as well. Yours was a voice I needed to hear and what I heard was you telling me to make up my own genie and turn her loose.

Sincerely,

Jane Isenberg

Dear Blog Readers,

Woman Blogging

Just a year ago I began posting thank-you notes to 70 authors who inspired me to write as a way of celebrating my 70^th birthday and I’m really glad I did. Selecting an author to thank is like ordering from an extensive menu at a fine restaurant without regard to cost, nutritional or caloric content, or carbon footprint. This is very liberating to a woman whose reading material was chosen first by parents, then teachers, and then, when she became a teacher and a writer, by curricular constraints or the demands of research. I love choosing what there is about a particular book that nourishes my creativity, my own craft.  What I make out of a book is also influenced by my personal experiences, so when I write to an author, I reflect on what was going on in my life when I read her or his book. Blogging enables me to shape and share these selections and reflections with you and to consider your insightful responses sent via email and comments on the blog site.

Who knew blogging would be so rewarding? I began this birthday blog because psychologists insist learning something new staves off dementia so

Dinosaur Reading

I figured mastering WordPress might stop me from stashing the chocolate gelato over the sink with the Brillo. Also back in 2010, bloggers were cool and hip, and I thought if I blogged, my kids and grand kids would think I was cool and hip rather than Jurassic. Finally, having finished The Bones and the Book, I wasn’t ready to undertake another novel, but I wanted to keep writing, to have readers. And maybe those same readers would read The Bones and the Book when it comes out. Well, I’m still misplacing things and my kids still think I’m prehistoric, and The Bones and the Book won’t be out until October, but I just love writing to authors and blogging for you. So thanks for following Notes to My Muses!  See you in May.

Sincerely,

Jane Isenberg

Dear Jean M. Auel,

The Clan of the Cave Bear

Clan of the Cave Bear was like my first date with my second husband, so good that I didn’t want it to ever end. The plight of the orphaned and homeless five-year-old Cro-Magnon girl Ayla gripped me. And the customs, rituals, and beliefs of the Neanderthals who find and adopt the child fascinated me. I read Clan in the early Eighties and got my teenaged daughter hooked on your Earth’s Children series too. But she’s not the only one with whom I shared your research-based stories of Ice Age life.

The others I introduced to your take on our prehistoric ancestors were community college students in a course called “Cultures and Values.” Most had jobs

Neanderthal Man

and/or families competing with college for their time and energy. Imagine their dismay when, after buying the book, they saw how long it was. They protested. I insisted. Of course, by our next class most had read far more than I assigned because, like my daughter and me and a zillion other readers, they were hooked. Ayal’s survival engaged them too, and your detailed descriptions of hunting, healing, mating, cooking, and worshiping astounded them. These descriptions reflect the research you did in anthropology, geology, and paleontology, and make those complex sciences accessible.

Neanderthal Cave-Croatioa

But it’s your storytelling that makes them matter. You make us realize that this tale you tell of a clan in a cave is our story, the human story, a backward glance into our very own family album. And we like who we see there or most of the family anyway. Our Ice Age ancestors weren’t the savage cave dwellers of myths and movies. Rather, most were folks very like us─ caring, familial, hard-working, and status conscious with customs and beliefs rooted in survival, tradition and faith. But like some of our relatives, Neanderthals weren’t all paragons. They were capable of envy and all were condemned by their brains’ structure to an overreliance on historical memory and a corresponding shortsightedness about the future.

Your research-based suppositions about pre-historic male-female relationships─ women are excluded from the Clan’s worship services and must kneel to ask permission to speak to a man, serve as pack animals when the Clan is on the move, care for children, gather and prepare food, AND submit to sex whenever a passing man indicates a “need”─ generated heated discussions. Many of us recognized vestiges of these patriarchal customs in our own families.

Herbs Once Used for Contraception

But my late Twentieth Century students living in the age of AIDs when it was hard to avoid sex education had a really tough time understanding how our ancestors could be so wrong about where babies come from. Clan members worship spirits and at birth each receives a totem, the spirit of an animal, from the Clan’s shaman. This protective spirit is represented by a small sculpted critter worn on a leather strip around the neck to ward off harmful spirits. For conception to happen, a man’s totem must overcome his mate’s. This totally invisible and literally out-of-body battle of two spirits has nothing to do with human biology and everything to do with the totemic spirit’s perceived prowess. Clan members make no connection between a man using a handy woman to relieve his sexual needs and the pregnancies that often result. Students were skeptical until I reminded them of how many “enlightened” and “modern” men and women are surprised to find themselves prospective parents.

Jewish Studies

Clan of the Cave Bear sensitized my students to how environment and human needs shape our culture and determine what we value. Not surprisingly, your work sensitized me in much the same way and was much in my thoughts when I finally dared look into my own family album, something I had resisted doing for at least half a lifetime. My research made me confront factors that influenced Jewish culture in Europe and then in America and see how those same factors shaped the priorities of the two people who raised me. Years later, these revelations about persecution, exile, loss, assimilation, and survival informed The Bones and the Book.  Like Ayla, Aliza Rudinsk becomes an outsider who must adapt to her new surroundings without the support of family and the security of familiar landmarks, language, and customs. And like Ayla, she wears a talisman of sorts around her neck.

Thank you for your important and catalytic research and writing.

Sincerely,

Jane Isenberg

Dear Val McDermid,

The Torment of Others

I’m writing to thank you for The Torment of Others and The Place of Execution,two novels that are examples of what a dexterous and imaginative writer

A Place of Execution

can do within the grim parameters of the crime novel. We’re familiar with the metaphor of mystery writer as spider, weaver of a web designed to draw in readers and hold us ensnared until, breathless and sleepless, we turn that last page. Well, in The Torment of Others you’re a super-spider, weaving at least two webs, one super-imposed on the other, forcing your reader to straddle strands to see how she missed that clue cleverly concealed in the first web that landed her hopelessly tangled in the second. There seem to be at least two sadistic killers for clinical psychologist Tony Hill and Deputy Chief Inspector Carol Jordan and her team to unmask and arrest. These psychopaths appear to be torturing and killing prostitutes in two different time frames and require two separate but simultaneous investigations. Tony and Carol are admirable with enough personal quirks to be entirely credible, but the team they work with includes a few folks I wouldn’t want to count on to have my back. In another example of your superb plotting, team members turn out to be part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Their machinations comprise a third web, just as deceptive to the hapless reader as the others. The resulting riddle makes a thrillingly acrobatic read that left me full of admiration for your plotting, your believable characters, and your descriptive prowess. Bravo super-spider! You got me again.

Spider and Web

Police Dog Tracking in UK

A Place of Executionis another of your novels featuring strands of separate crimes interwoven in overlapping webs of complexity that kept this

Brando in On the Waterfront

reader up way past her bedtime. In one especially grim and exacting scene police dogs search for clues that might lead them to Alison, the missing girl. Years ago that scene led an admiring reader at a conference where you spoke to ask, “How many weeks did you spend researching those police dogs?” I was in that audience and I’ve never forgotten your reply. “Part of an afternoon. I’m a fiction writer. We make stuff up.” Your words were a reminder I needed. I was researching homing pigeons and their breeders in Hoboken for Hot on the Trail, but I’d failed to gain access to the xenophobic pigeon aficionados’ meeting place. Pissed off and emboldened by your declaration, in a Martha meets Marlon meets McDermid moment, I made up a clubhouse.

One more thing. Many of your books include gay and lesbian characters, but in The Torment of Others you make a lesbian the sadistic killer. I was raised to believe that my

Not Resting in Peace

slightest lapse in behavior or personal hygiene would reflect badly on all Jews, further endangering us in a world ever ready to believe the worst of us. And I still have second thoughts about making a member of any historically persecuted group, especially my own, serve as one of my criminals. Your example made it easier for me to create a murderous Jew in The Bones and the Book even as my parents, anxious still, flip over and over in their graves.

Thank you for your exemplary and chilling novels and for your succinct reminder of what fiction writers do.

Sincerely,

Jane Isenberg

Dear Walter Mosley,

Devil in a Blue Dress

Thanks for the memories. Really. Your period PI-based mystery Devil in a Blue Dress always takes me back to the Fifties, back to the Twentieth Century to remind me of how precarious life was for blacks before the Civil Rights Movement. Or, as your hero and narrator, Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlings, puts it, “…life was hard back then and you just had to take the bad along with the worse if you wanted to survive.” Easy is my tour guide through the black bars of long ago LA and through that city’s prisons, offices, and neighborhoods. Like you, I’m old enough to remember pre-Civil Rights America, and my memories aren’t pretty. So whenever I hear conservative pundits blame America’s current problems on changes wrought in a utopian US by the Sixties, I want to sit them down with a copy of Devil in a Blue Dress. Your novel inspired me to consider writing my own historical mystery belying the sanitized revision of those “good ol’ days” that many “good ol’ boys” recall so fondly.

Levittown House 1948

The story Easy tells is full of sex and violence, but his voice is well, easy, and his personality cool and, dare I say it, sweet. You leave it to Mouse, Easy’s crazy friend and sidekick, to do most of the dirty work. That way when Mouse shoots a killer aiming for Easy in Easy’s living room, Easy is free to worry about whether the dead man’s blood is staining his sofa. In fact, Easy’s domesticity, his love for his modest home with its little yard where he waters his dahlias, is touching. To earn the bungalow that defines the American Dream, Easy served his country admirably, survived, and then worked in a factory. When a racist manager fires him from his factory job, Easy’s not going to let his mortgage go unpaid and risk losing his house. Instead, he turns his free time, his need for mortgage money, and a highly suspect request into a new career as a private investigator. By the end of the book, Easy’s his own boss, in business for himself. Move over Phillip Marlowe and Sam Spade!

Tuskagee Airmen WW II

Easy was raised in Texas and migrated to LA after he returned from military service in a black unit overseas. He and his Texas friends are outsiders in LA and in America too. The devil of the title is also an outsider, a mixed race Texas transplant “passing” as white. As the son of a Jewish woman and an African-American man, you are familiar with issues of American identity that affect us all and reflect our own complex history, a history too often revised by vote-seeking politicians. It’s ironic that it’s left to fiction writers like you to give us facts while many of our candidates for public office spin the past into moralizing myths.

Interracial Couple

One of those myths you use Easy to debunk is that of the African-American male as Willie Horton, a brutish criminal lusting after white women.

Noose

Easy barely has time to lust after any woman before she comes on to him. By the end of Devil in a Blue Dress, he has not only rescued and bedded the damsel in distress, but also saved a child and a friend. And he’s come to terms with those necessary compromises one makes to survive. He’s still an outsider, but he’s shrewd enough to use his considerable resources to stake out, lay claim to, and hold onto his piece of the American Dream. And reading about how he does this always keeps me turning pages far into the night. And then it leaves me wide awake, thinking about how to make up believable characters who are also outsiders trying to hold onto their own homes and to their own piece of that precious American dream. Thank you for Easy and the gripping and gritty stories you tell about him and about those “good ol’ days.”

Sincerely,

Jane Isenberg

Dear Jonathan Franzen,

The Corrections

Who knew I’d ever write to thank you for The Corrections? I almost put your novel down shortly after I started it. Your bleak description of that aging, anxious, and afflicted couple, Enid and Al Lambert, scared the hell out of me. It conjured up memories of my own parents’ sad and slow declines. But even more disheartening, your portrait of Enid and Al mirrored my worst fears for my own future and that of my husband Phil. Like Al, Phil suffers from Parkinson’s Disease, and after ten years his meds were far less effective than they had been, so his symptoms were very troublesome and becoming worse. I imagined the day when my brilliant husband would, like Al, “lack the neurological wherewithal” to cope, when Phil too would pee in paint cans and his occasional naps would “deepen towards enchantment.” As I read, it was hard not to see Phil turning into a less belligerent version of Al while I played Enid. For like her, I find “empty hours a sinus in which

Some Parkinson's Symptoms

infections breed” and live with the “alarm bell of anxiety” always tolling in my head.  Your indelible word pictures confirmed my grim vision of the days to come. I was too upset to be amused when you introduced Enid and Chip’s narcissistic, snotty, and misogynistic son Chip. Only my vindictive desire to see which woman would dump Chip next kept me reading. In spite of myself, I was hooked.

Oprah Promoting Reading

Then before I could finish the book, you pulled a Komen and dissed Oprah.  Now, unlike you as you describe yourself in your 02/13 & 20/12 New Yorker piece on Edith Wharton, I don’t usually let a novelist’s extra-literary misbehavior─ “posturing” drinking, using drugs, making politically incorrect slurs, being unfaithful and/or promiscuous, or committing suicide─ influence my literary preferences or experiences. No, for me, what happens outside the books stays outside the books. But for nearly forty years as a high school English teacher and then as a community college English prof I busted my hump to get students to read more and had only limited success. Then, seemingly overnight, Oprah made reading and writers hip. Thanks to her, many of my students did begin reading more, and to this day I remain grateful. So when I read of your gaffe/stunt, I was glad I’d gotten The Corrections from the library instead of buying a copy. I didn’t want a sexist, racist, and classist snob like I figured you must be to profit from my purchase. But because I wanted to find out what happened to the Lamberts, I read on. I was amazed and relieved when you granted most of the beleaguered family and this overwrought reader a fairly happy ending.

But by the time I got to that ending, I was worried about my library fine. As you know better than most, The Corrections is long and took you seven years to write. I was writing one Bel Barrett mystery a year, often while teaching full-time. Later, after I had spent five years researching and writing The Bones and the Book, the still unfinished manuscript was longer than the longest book I’d ever written. I felt as if I were twelve months pregnant. Over and over I reminded myself, “Not to worry. The Corrections is much longer and Franzen spent seven years on it.”

Very Pregnant

Freedomis long too. But, perhaps because I recognized the characters without over identifying with any of them, I got the satire right away, and this time around I enjoyed

Freedom

the wealth of wit and attention you lavish on our world. One of my favorite scenes finds Joey in the bathroom of a hotel room he’s sharing with a beautiful woman who is not his long suffering wife. To rescue his wedding ring, which he’s swallowed and expelled, he gropes for it in the toilet full of his own turds.  The fact that a similar scenario

figured in an episode of Two and a Half Men leads me to believe that maybe Chuck Lorre shares my enthusiasm for scatological fishing expeditions. We’re not alone. A half century ago, J. P. Donleavy wrote The Ginger Man which includes a scene featuring an overworked and under appreciated housewife ironing in the kitchen below a bathroom in which her husband is shitting. When the ceiling gives way, the poor, beleaguered woman is showered by excrement. I find it noteworthy that in our more egalitarian era the shit that so often happens to the married is now shared by husbands as well as wives. This just may be a sign of progress, and I’m not surprised you picked up on it.

It’s really hard to write serious fiction that is also comic, but you are very accomplished at it. Thanks for your provocative and witty books (and for apologizing to Oprah).

Sincerely,

Jane Isenberg

Dear Elizabeth George,

This Body of Death

his Body of Death

This Body of Death is just one of your many absorbing mysteries, but it’s the one I happened to be reading this past December when Colton Harris-Moore, the “barefoot bandit,” was first sentenced. Because you and I both live in western Washington, I know you’re familiar with the exploits of the Camano Island teen who stole cars, airplanes, and boats and burgled numerous homes and shops in several states and the Caribbean. Like the young boys in This Body of Death, Harris-Moore suffered neglect and abuse and by adolescence was a criminal. But he was a thief, not a sadistic killer of smaller children like the British boys whose tragic story, supposedly based on a real case, you weave into your own gripping tale.

Ten-Year-Old Killer

You go beyond the horrifying headlines by forcing the reader to consider what happens to youthful predators after they have served their sentences, grown into men, assumed new identities.  Already claiming remorse, Colin Harris-Moore plans to repay the people he robbed with earnings from a film based on his life story. But how do you repay the parents of a

Taking Medicine

two-year-old you have tortured and killed? How do you come to terms with what you’ve done? Will/can you ever know love? Peace of mind? These are the questions you ask your readers to consider in This Body of Death even while you have us solving a seemingly unconnected murder along with intrepid investigators, Sir Thomas Lynley and Barbara Havers. Thus you force us to confront the deadly results of the neglect and abuse of children by their parents and of our failure to recognize and help those children before they become capable of doing harm. We, your readers, are not blameless in your eyes. It takes a superb writer to sweeten this bitter dose of moral censure with intrigue, suspense, and credible characters so that we greedily gulp it down. Dickens and Brontë did it. You do it.

And, like those British writers, you, an American, set your miracles of mystery and morality in England. When I’m engrossed in one of your books, I’m back

Changing of the Guard

in Britain where I’ve visited as a tourist, a student, and a teacher. But I haven’t crossed the pond in well over a decade, so when I need to feed my Anglophilia, I turn to your books. Your Inspector Lynley and his cohort Barbara Havers represent both ends of the still extant British class system, and their colleagues, clients, and suspects fill in the rest. Their England is a place I recognize, diverse and ever changing yet familiar. Your novels feature iconic country cottages and manor houses on one page and urban rooming houses and offices a few chapters later. The details you provide make my armchair tourism possible and the horrific events you recount credible.

Your characters, especially Barbara Havers, are also credible. After watching far too many TV crime shows, I’m used to female detectives like Bones, Beckett, and Benson, beautiful, brilliant women haunted by their dead mothers. So it’s refreshing to meet Barbara who’s neither a knockout nor a neurotic. Instead she’s bright, bedraggled, and brave. She’s loyal but her loyalty doesn’t prevent her from following up on a clue instead of following orders. If chasing down that clue means going without backup, she’s on her way. I’m a committed coward, so I have a lot of respect for Barbara’s guts. And I love her work ethic. She doesn’t give up. Nor does she let her feelings for Lynley, her longtime boss, prevent her from working effectively with him. And when her new female boss, an alcoholic, orders Barbara to improve her fashion statement so she looks “professional,” Barbara reluctantly complies. In the Seventies I had a boss who wasn’t into jeans and peasant blouses and told me and my colleagues to revamp our teaching  wardrobes. No wonder I like reading about a “dowdy” female detective who doesn’t show up at a crime scene sporting stilettoes and mascara.

Believing the Lie

Your first mystery was published just a few years before I retired and while I was writing humorous cozies featuring a menopausal sleuth. Your novels enriched my retirement and served as models when I decided to attempt writing the serious historical mystery that became The Bones and the Book. And now I can’t wait to read Believing the Lie.

Sincerely,

Jane Isenberg

Dear Zadie Smith,

White Teeth

I read White Teeth first at a lovely lakeside resort in Maine where my husband and I used to vacation for a week every summer. There we retreated from the many stresses of our workaday urban lives. There one afternoon I lay prone on a glider on our porch beside the same loon-friendly lake Steven King views from his home. Digesting a fabulous lunch I didn’t make or microwave, I started your novel. I was transported back to 1975 to a heavily trafficked intersection in London similar to countless intersections in the New York metropolitan area we’d just fled. Not exactly my idea of vacation reading. But then I found sluggish post prandial me laughing my head off while bearing witness to the aborted suicide attempt of one Alfred Archibald Jones.  Not only did you make Archie’s failure to self-destruct amusing at the exact same time that it was pathetic, but you also definitively answered a question I’ve often pondered: What Makes Shit Happen?

As I read on, you answered another question for me too. Or maybe I should say you validated my sense of the role of a novelist in our diverse society. I always thought

From Cuban Santeria Museum

it was our job to reflect our vision of the world, not to tailor that vision to what we imagine readers might like. (That’s why I’ve never even been tempted to write about a menopausal vampire!) But that summer I was still writing The Bel Barrett Mystery Series and had submitted a proposal to my editor for what would become Hot and Bothered. The plot depended on the practice of Santeria, the mix of Catholicism and African religion that many immigrants from the Caribbean bring to America and practice. At that time there were still many practitioners in Hudson County, New Jersey where my

East London Anti mosque Protesters

series takes place. I was fascinated by their rituals and beliefs. Alas, my editor found Santeria “too exotic,” and I conceived another plot for the novel. But in White Teeth you reflect the beliefs, rituals, and histories of several immigrant groups and social classes as well as the particular patois of their members. Nothing is ‘too exotic” for you to mirror or skewer, and as a longtime urban community college prof, I recognized the fluid world your Bengali-Brits inhabit. Those characters themselves are plausible rather than exotic. Reassured, I kept your example in mind as I wrote Hot and Bothered and Hot Wired in which Bel ventures into the worlds of strippers and rappers respectively.

Years later when I began The Bones and the Book, I again found inspiration in White Teeth.For in that novel you roam freely throughout world history as

Geneology Book

one must when peopling a novel with descendants of colonials and crusaders. I marveled anew at your knowledge and appreciation of how memory distorts history and affects how the past influences the present. In The Bones and the Book I include characters representing three different generations of Jewish immigrants to Seattle and move backwards and forwards in time as they maintain and/or shed rituals and beliefs some editors would no doubt deem “too exotic.”

Present-racial America

I also enjoyed your next novel, On Beauty. Again, I marvel at your ability to capture the zeitgeist around you, in this case, the “post racial” world of American-Anglo academics in a New England college town. Even more, I marvel at your sense of humor. Jon Stewart aside, it’s not easy to be funny about serious issues like racism, elitism, betrayal, sexism, ageism, and the decline of the liberal arts but, as in White Teeth, you manage it. Thank you.

Sincerely,

Jane Isenberg

Dear Tony Hillerman,

Coyote Waits

When my own life feels especially chaotic, I reach for one of your Joe Leaphorn mysteries in the hope of restoring a sense of order to my spinning soul. There is something stabilizing about your “legendary” Lieutenant of the Navajo Tribal Police. Perhaps it’s Leaphorn’s sensible, step-by-step approach to nabbing even the most elusive and nasty killer. It could also be his long and happy marriage. Or maybe it’s his resigned attitude towards the NTP’s bureaucracy, his years of experience, or his reasoned way of working with his younger subordinate, Jim Chee. All I can tell you is that when my own life caroms out of control, Joe Leaphorn is my go-to man. A sexy bad boy he’s not. But Leaphorn uncovers and catches killers without my having to worry about him drinking and smoking himself to death like I do when I read about the PIs in noir crime stories.

The lieutenant may not make my pulse accelerate, but your stories about him do. That’s because Leaphorn and Chee are sleuthing in the stunning terrain of the

Black Mesa, NM

Southwest, a vast haunted land full of secrets. Both officers spend hours each day and sometimes each night too in separate cars driving from a crime scene to the Tribal police station or the courthouse or into the desert to interview a suspect or witness or follow up on a clue.  I first set foot in New Mexico in the early Nineties when my husband and I went to a wedding in Albuquerque. Gaping out our car window, I experienced déjà vu. I’d already explored those Anasazi ruins, the Rio Grande, the mountains, mesas and miles of road in your books. So that day in our rented Chevrolet I was riding shotgun with Leaphorn, keeping an eye out for the skinwalkers, shape changers, and ghosts that the Diné believe still haunt the area. I almost forgot the wedding and we came close to arriving late.

Navajo Hogan

Part of my ongoing fascination with your mysteries comes from how you infuse them with traditional tribal beliefs and customs and how those often conflict and/or contrast with the ways of white people. How you use this tension between insiders and outsiders and between traditionalists and modernists makes the familiar mystery format crackle with new vitality and was very much on my mind when I

Navajo Healing Way Sand Painting

began writing The Bones and the Book. So when readers of early drafts told me, “It’s a good story, but it’s too Jewish,” I took solace in remembering how your agent told you your first novel, The Blessing Way, would be a best seller if you’d only “get rid of the Indian stuff.” In the work of a lesser writer that “Indian stuff” might be arcane and off-putting, but in your novels it’s integral to the story and the characters, so it’s both gripping and accessible. I kept your example in mind as I revised.

There’s at least one more thing I really enjoy about your books. Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee are mentor and sidekick, boss and subordinate, Holmes and Watson.

Holmes and Watson

But those prototypical two are doomed to forever replay their roles of genius and stooge. Not so with Leaphorn and Chee. Their responses to each other run the gamut—rivalry, respect, resentment—and vary day by day, year by year, case by case. Leaphorn and Chee gradually and realistically learn to appreciate and exploit one another’s strengths to forge a satisfying and effective partnership that continues to evolve even after, in Coyote Waits, Leaphorn retires. You knew about male bonding before it became a TV and movie cliché.

So when I write mysteries, yours are still among the models I use. I too want to create believable characters who forge recognizable relationships with one another in a setting rich in cultural conundrums that fuel conflict and challenge my detective. And in The Bel Barrett Mysteries as well as later in The Bones and the Book, I’ve dreamed up amateur sleuths who are, at heart, neither sirens nor shrews, but nice, Jewish girls grown up.

Thank you again for your inspiring stories.

Sincerely,

Jane Isenberg

Dear Toni Morrison,

The Bluest Eye

Thank you for your soul-searing books. The Bluest Eyecame out in 1970, the year my daughter was born. I thought of it as one of those new baby gifts that the infant

will one day grow into. She did, but meanwhile I read it over and over. By 1970, Baldwin, Wright, Ellison, and Brown had already taught me what coming of age was

Original Barbie

like for African-American boys. What was it like for girls?  You taught me. In The Bluest Eye I identified with those little girls and grown women who longed to look white because white, not black, was beautiful. You make it clear how this supremacy of whiteness privileges some while condemning others, like Pecola and her mother, to misery. I reread The Bluest Eye most recently after my daughter’s daughter became the delighted owner of Rebecca, the pug-nosed Jewish American Girl doll. I noted (to myself, of course) that in spite of her period wardrobe and her Lower Eastside back story, Becky sure doesn’t look Jewish unless, like me, she had a nose job.

With each book of yours, I learned a lot of other things too. I’m especially grateful for Beloved, set in Ohio shortly after the Civil War and peopled by former slaves haunted by recollections of their years as property. Beloved made vivid and unforgettable to me the often used phrase “legacy of slavery.”  Before Beloved, I’d understood that legacy mostly in abstract terms like “separated families” and “forced illiteracy” and “overseer cruelty.” After Beloved, when I hear or read of this legacy, I envision men and women with iron bits distorting and tearing their mouths as, worked like horses, they haul loads. I see black men in flames dangling from trees and a grown white man forcing a lactating black mother to suckle him before beating her bloody. I see a mother slashing the throat of her own baby girl rather than allowing the child to be captured by slave catchers and returned to captivity. Such memories are the unspeakable legacy of slavery that you, by speaking of them in your books, make your readers confront.

Victim of Slavery

Homeless in USA

But in Beloved as in all your work, I got much more than a history lesson. I also got a lesson in storytelling: how to weave cultural elements, back stories, and symbols seamlessly into narrative, to alternate points of view, to write pitch perfect dialogue and description that matters: “There is a difference between being put out and being put outdoors . If you are put out, you go somewhere else. If you are outdoors, there is no place to go. . . .Being a minority in both caste and class, we moved about anyway on the hem of life . . . struggling to hang on or to creep singly up into the major folds of the garment.”

Toni-Morrison

And Beloved is also a ghost story. Your haunted characters all believe in ghosts, so I suspend my own disbelief to enter their troubled world where a baby ghost and a ghostly teen kick up a ruckus. Inspired, in The Bones and the Book, I created a Nineteenth Century immigrant girl haunted by ghosts from her past who fights the growing conviction that displacement and loss have transformed her into a ghost.

I’m glad you won the Nobel Prize and so grateful to you for telling stories that keep me turning pages even while I face up to some hard facts about American history which is, after all, a legacy all Americans share.

Sincerely,

Jane Isenberg

Dear Jean Hanff Korelitz,

Admission

Broken Heart

Your novel, Admission, turned this law-abiding and respectable retiree into a thief. I was in the local Laundromat when I realized I forgot my crossword puzzle, so I looked around for a magazine. There on the window seat was a lone book, your book. I recalled reading a review of it in The New York Times. I picked it up and read your first sentence: “The flight from Newark to Hartford took no more than fifty-eight minutes, but she still managed to get her heart broken three times.” I was hooked! Who was this woman? And who dared break her heart mid-flight?

Up in the Air to the contrary, flying today is about as romantic as belching but without the accompanying relief. I had to know more about a woman who could get her heart broken while sitting accordion pleated between a mom gently suggesting to her shrieking toddler that kicking the seat in front of him was not a wise decision and a man wearing suspiciously clunky shoes muttering under his breath in a foreign language. Oblivious to the whirling wash, I read on, putting your novel down only to heave my quilt into the dryer. After that machine finished its work, I glanced furtively at the one other person in the Laundromat. She was engrossed in carefully folding an entire load of jeans, so, vowing to return it, I stuffed Admission into my backpack, folded my clean comforter and slunk out.

Laundromat Dryer

That morning I’d been working on a short story and was dissatisfied, particularly with the way it began. Reading and rereading your gem of an opener helped me return to my own work convinced that with more thought and tweaking, I, too, might come up with an engaging start for my story. But it wasn’t only the beginning of Admission that I savored. I was taken by the heartbroken Portia, your novel’s central character, an admissions officer of Princeton University. Her eagerness to sleep with a colleague on a business trip makes her seem, at first, more like a stereotypical guy. But later, her personal history─ being raised by a second wave feminist of my generation only to be dumped, depressed, and canned─ resonates thanks to your exacting portrayal of both women and their times. I admire your ability to weave Portia’s backstory into the novel in a way that adds intrigue to its plot and layers to its themes. It’s not easy to do that.

College Admissions Crapshoot

Your insider’s view of the admission process at Princeton is also detailed and provides perspective on the academy as workplace and on the personal, political, and social issues that affect gatekeepers and applicants to the Ivies. Portia’s job description includes reading and judging the college application essays of thousands of high school seniors, and it is these aspiring youngsters, most of whose essays she must weed out,  who break her heart over and over again. You let us read snatches of these poignant pieces over her shoulder, illuminating the inexact and painful process of creating and/or maintaining the American elite.

Pioneer Valley

Part of your book is set, of course, at Princeton, but Portia’s work takes her also to western Massachusetts where she grew up. My husband and I lived in Amherst for two and a half years, and found the Pioneer Valley’s gentle hills, picturesque farms, and four seasons to be as lovely as they appear on the catalog covers of the five colleges and numerous prep schools located there. Seeing the educational extremes that flourish in this corner of New England through Portia’s jaded eyes was illuminating.

Thanks for writing engagingly and convincingly about a complex woman living, working, and loving in an imperfect world. Now I’ll get your book back to the Laundromat!

Sincerely,

Wanted Dead or Alive

Jane Isenberg

Dear William Faulkner,

The Sound and the Fury

            That first time is always memorable, right? That’s why I remember very clearly the first time I read a novel I couldn’t understand. I was a freshman in college, and my English prof assigned The Sound and the Fury. I didn’t understand a word. No, that’s wrong. I understood the individual words, but not the way you strung them together. Even the Appendix, which in my Modern Library copy serves as a kind of backward-glancing forward, was mysterious. The way you paired incompatible words like American and king in a sentence fragment followed by a long seldom punctuated procession of other words, English and French, chasing each other over the page intrigued me. Where were the sentences? Who the hell was narrating? When? I was frustrated because even though I didn’t get the who, what, where, when, and why of your story, I wanted to know what was with that American king. So I persisted, but without much success until I got to class. There, with the patience of a gallery docent escorting a nun through a Maplethorpe exhibit, my marvelous prof, Julia McGrew, walked us through those first few pages.

Cotton Planation

            She also explained your use of the stream of consciousness to narrate the story of the decline of the Compsons, a once aristocratic Southern family. The audacity of telling part of their story through the disjointed and fragmented internal monologue of Benjy, a severely mentally challenged adult male Compson, both moved and fascinated me. I’d always felt sorry for people who were what we used to call “mentally retarded.” Such a person, Joan, a little girl in a woman’s body, lived around the corner from me when I was growing up. My sympathy for her blinded me to the possibility that she or any “idiot” might have thoughts and perceptions of interest to anyone, might have a world view, a tale to tell that was, Shakespeare to the contrary, not only reliable, but significant.

And suppose an author did choose to give such a character voice. How would this daringly original writer manage it? I reread Benjy’s section of The Sound and the Fury, marveling at the power of his recurring sense-memory of his beloved sister: “Caddie smelled like trees.” Benjy’s version of people and events, filtered through sights, sounds, smells, tastes and textures and through his never-abating sense of loss, reveals the true nature of each of his relatives even as their family disintegrates around him. No wonder you won the Nobel Prize!

Yoknapatawpha County

  And no wonder your work inspired me to write one of my most important pieces:  my senior thesis, a requirement for English majors at Vassar. I knew I would spend considerable time on this project, so I wanted a topic that could compete for my attention with my job search, weekends with my fiancé, and late night gab sessions with dear friends from whom I’d soon be separated. I chose you. That’s how I got to spend my senior year in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi , the fictional setting you populate with gothic grotesques lost in the fallout from the wars and “progress” that are American history.

C Student's Guide

My thesis, cribbed from your Nobel acceptance speech, was that in spite of the grimness and despair that haunt your work, you feel people are capable of compassion, that mankind has cause to hope, and that it is the duty of writers to tell of the struggles of the human heart. I wish I could tell you that I aced that paper, but I got a C- on it. Even though I had immersed myself in your books, I had not made a similarly thorough study of the rudiments of English grammar, spelling, documentation, or even typing. And in spite of my immersion, some of your writing still remained mysterious to me. I suspect I passed partly because I chose to tackle such a challenging writer.

Girl Reading Faulkner

You challenge me still which may be why, half a century later, I reread your marvelous books to revisit the streaming consciousnesses of the people you invent, to become, literally, a mind reader. Maybe someday I’ll move closer to becoming a mind writer like you. Meanwhile, thanks for all these decades of inspiration.

Sincerely,

Jane Isenberg

Dear Carolyn Heilbrun aka Amanda Cross,

  I owe you my life, or at least my life story. In Writing a Woman’s Life, I recognized the silencing script that had defined my own life. My dad, whom I idolized, used his lawyer’s training and patriarchal power to silence my mother. Not surprisingly, my first husband muted my voice too. He tired of listening to the stories I told of my struggle to learn to teach and accused me of having a “pseudo-sophisticated New York-New Jersey-Jewish sense of humor,” apparently a very bad trait to have in Connecticut in 1962.

Decades later when I read Writing a Woman’s Life, I wondered if you’d been a fly on the wall of our apartment. You describe how until the 1970s, scripts for women’s lives differed from those for men and how these scripts kept us from participating in public discourse, kept us powerless. Then you go on to explain how these scripts also limited the way biographers, autobiographers, and historians, female and male, wrote about women’s lives. Your insight and analysis inspired me to write Going by the Book where I finally tell the teaching stories that mean so much to me. That this memoir was accepted for publication and won an award validated my newfound public voice, and I became a professional writer.

Not content to have launched me as a nonfiction author, you also are partly responsible for my becoming a writer of feminist academic mysteries. An English prof myself, I was no stranger to campus politics, sexism, and silliness, so I loved Death in a Tenured Position featuring Professor Kate Fansler. When I dreamed up menopausal sleuth Bel Barrett and a story to put her in, I remembered Death in a Tenured Position. Like that novel, mine would skewer academic pretensions and sexism not at Harvard, but at a humble urban community college in a poor county. Unlike fortyish, chic, childless, and wealthy Professor Kate Fansler, Professor Bel Barrett would be a sweaty midlife divorcée coping with “adult” kids.   

As you acknowledged Kate to be your alter ego, Bel would be mine. Where I have always been fearful, Bel would be brave. No pre-feminist script would prevent her from going after murderers or from making public her experience of that then unmentionable passage: menopause. The silence surrounding menopause as recently as twelve years ago infuriated me as did the marginalization of midlife and older women. What fun I had sending brave Bel on dangerous quests and making her the booming voice of my sweaty fifty-something sisters!

Your example and analysis continue to influence my work. The three Jewish women whose stories I tell in The Bones and the Book, a historical mystery, also struggle to escape patriarchy-perpetuating scripts that would deprive them of meaningful public roles. Writing about these women was not the giggle fest I enjoyed as I wrote about Bel’s crusades. The limited lives of women before feminism are no laughing matter, so at times I wept even as I typed.

Thank you for writing books that helped give me the push and the power to write my own. And because I just celebrated yet another birthday, thank you for pointing out that for some women who write, aging gives us the opportunity to use “our security, our seniority to take risks, to make noise, to be courageous, to become unpopular.”

Sincerely,

Jane Isenberg.

Dear Michael Chabon,

 

 Thank you for liberating my inner Jew! A few years ago I experienced an adult bat mitzvah and moved to Washington State. These two experiences, a belated reunion with my Jewish roots and a Diaspora-worthy sense of dislocation, inspired me to write something different from the comic cozies featuring a menopausal protagonist that I wrote in New Jersey. I’d write the Great Northwest Feminist Jewish Mystery, a herstorical whodunit. I was well into this project when I discovered that you’d already written it: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.

 Giving rein to professional jealousy over your novel’s deliciously high concept would be silly. I love the image of Sitka, Alaska as The Promised Land and the way you recreate Yiddishkeit there. How clever is that? And loathing you for your ability to write perfect dialogue or for your superior knowledge of all things Jewish is not in my moral make-up. I’m not the petty sort who would despise you for describing people, including a possible Messiah and your protagonist Meyer Landsman, so vividly that I reread some passages several times just to savor your artfully arranged sequences of telling details. What reader could resist Meyer who “has the memory of a convict, the balls of a fireman, and the eyesight of a housebreaker”?  Nor do I hold it against you that your story made me laugh and cry which, at my age, is a risky business. And who am I to resent a man for twisting the testosterone-tinged formula of the noir into a tale in which a woman saves the day and the “hero” is happy about it? Not my style.

 Instead, I took the high road and used your fabulous book to keep me from being discouraged when members of my writing group complained about the occasional Yiddishisms in my manuscript or when my own inner voice, a one-woman chorus of self-doubt, chimed in: “No one will publish this, Jane. It’s too Jewish. It’s not Jewish enough. It’s too commercial. It’s not commercial enough. There’s not enough sex and violence. There’s too much sex and violence. It’s not like your other books. . . .”

            The Yiddish Policemen’s Union offered me a timely perspective on Jews as outsiders and on the significance and nature of a Jewish homeland presented in the highly palatable form of a really good mystery. You make the many dreads of the Diaspora accessible to younger Jews and non-Jews alike, no small feat. I’m also grateful to you for using your Pulitzer- enhanced prestige and overdose of storytelling talent to legitimize mysteries in the minds of those who insist crime fiction is not “literary.” The Yiddish Policemen’s Union disproves that notion. I forgive you for writing it. Thank you and mazel tov! 

Sincerely,

Jane Isenberg

Dear Charlotte Brontë,

Let me add my feminist yawp to the melodious chorus of readers grateful for Jane Eyre. I first met your small, plain, and bookish orphan girl over a hundred years after you wrote her into existence. I was in high school in the fifties, not my best decade. Like Jane, I was skinny, plain, and bookish, but our similarities ended there. For Jane is brave and I’ve always been fearful. I knew I could never survive the many physical hardships she did, but I figured I could follow Jane’s example and hang onto my virginity until, like her, I married my true love. So I guarded the temple through high school and just said no  in college until I graduated in1962 when, on schedule, a wedding band joined the engagement ring on my finger. In the century since you published Jane’s story, little had changed vis á vis the options available to young women.

But that was just before Women’s Liberation. In the early seventies in a grad school course on the 19^th century novel, I read Jane Eyre again. Jane had not changed, but the way I read her had. I’d been married ten years and had a little girl. My bra was in ashes, my armpits tufted, and I was teaching English to community college students. These factors plus my male professor’s determination to paint Jane as an early feminist helped me to see her that way too. This prof taught us about male preference primogeniture, the English system of inheritance decreeing that property went to the oldest male heir leaving his sisters to either marry or find work as servants, clerks, or governesses and his brothers to become clergymen or lawyers or find some other vocation. I’d not come across this patriarchy- preserving piece of legislation before, and learning about it changed the way I read your novel.

 Suddenly I understood why you didn’t allow Jane to participate, however  unknowingly, in an illegal marriage to the already married Rochester. Such a union would have offered her no protection and her status would remain unchanged. Before the fire that killed the first Mrs. Rochester, you depicted Rochester himself as extremely powerful. Physically strong with dark eyes and hair, he rode a demonic black stallion and owned a fierce black dog. Together this testosterone-heavy threesome roamed the wild moors, which suited Rochester’s stormy temperament. He also had money, a time-tested virility enhancer. He was powerful. In contrast, Jane is physically weak, fair, virginal, and penniless. But after the fire, Rochester is blind and has lost the use of one arm, a not so subtle phallic reference. The ruins of his mansion  show his decreased finances. However thanks to an unexpected inheritance, Jane is finally financially independent. They are equal. It is only then that you allow them to marry and live happily ever after. Only then can he literally see the world through her eyes and literally follow her lead. Bravo!

So for me Jane Eyre became a highly readable primer on how the personal and the political overlap in the lives of women. Jane helped inspire Aliza Rudinsk, the diarist of my novel The Bones and the Book. Aliza is a gutsy but poor and orphaned Jewish immigrant struggling to work and love in a world where she has pride but little power and monetary  inheritance to allow a happy ending to her story. Thanks for creating a memorable character, one who still moves me to think and write about how hard life is for women when the boys have all the money and clout.  

Sincerely,

Jane Isenberg

Dear David Guterson,

I didn’t read your gripping novel Snow Falling on Cedars because it won the PEN/Faulkner Award. I didn’t read it because it’s a mystery, and I write mysteries myself.  No, I read your book because I’ve always turned to fiction to get the facts, and I wanted to learn more about the Pacific Northwest where my daughter and her boyfriend had settled.  During one of my visits in the late nineties I bought Snow Falling to read on my flight back to Newark.

To this twentieth century tourist, the Seattle area seemed progressive in the best sense of the word. The place seemed too damn hip for racism or anti-Semitism, and I figured it always had been. But reading your dramatic story of how after World War II anti-Japanese bias and post-traumatic stress skew a murder investigation made me wonder. Until I met Kabuo Miyamoto and his wife Hatsue in your novel, the Internment of Japanese-Americans was an abstraction to me and the post war reintegration of the internees into their communities something I’d literally never considered.

Reading of the Miyamotos’ struggle, I found myself wondering what life in the Pacific Northwest was like for Jews during the postwar period. We too had been foreigners. Had we also been blamed for World War II? For being different?  Kabuo and Hatsue are not the only outsiders in your novel. Ishmael, your story’s narrator and a native son, is another. Ishmael is isolated not by his ethnicity but by his war injury and experiences and by his unrequited love for Hatsue, his childhood sweetheart. Both men find strength in memories of their fathers’ cultural and ethical legacies, discoveries not lost on me when, years later, my husband and I moved Out Here and I found myself an outsider.

Phil and I left the east coast for Issaquah, Washington, a suburb of Seattle, in 2003. Although I was still writing the last two books in The Bel Barrett Mystery Series, I was planning to begin work on a historical mystery about an immigrant Jewish girl on New York’s Lower East Side. Writing about an immigrant felt appropriate because here, where I am often the only Jew in the room, I felt myself an outsider. Even as I explained Jewish customs and beliefs to people who actually knew no other Jews, I wasn’t sure I belonged here. The outsiders in Snow Falling on Cedars were much on my mind.

Very, very tentatively I began to consider setting the historical mystery I planned to write not in New York, but in Seattle when it was a frontier town. I began to research what life in the Pacific Northwest was like for those Jews who came here long before I did. Reading Snow Falling on Cedars, a novel as provocative as it is beautiful, inspired the research that eventually led to The Bones and the Book.

But that mystery is not the only novel of mine inspired by Snow Falling on Cedars. Your beautifully written descriptions of the snow, the sea, and the woodlands reinforced this former tourist’s impression that here in the Puget Sound area waterways matter. During my visits I’d seen for myself the many creeks, rivers, lakes, waterfalls and wetlands that divide the terrain and marveled at the scenic inlets, channels, coves, and bays that indent the coast.

Rivers and the ocean matter in The Garden State too. But during my lifetime, northeastern New Jersey, a place I love, has been so overdeveloped that, to tell the embarrassing truth, I never really thought of it as a part of the natural world. But years ago, staring out the window of that jet as we flew low over the notorious New Jersey Meadowlands approaching Newark, your watery tale made waves in my mind. In comparison to the sublimely beautiful San Piedro Island where Snow Falling is set, North Jersey’s familiar boggy backyard appeared more of a wasteland than usual. But with Snow Falling on my lap, I looked at the place differently.  Just as the Puget Sound hasn’t always been home to the cruise and cargo ships, ferries, and Navy installations there now, maybe the Meadowlands hadn’t always been a body drop and a garbage dump.

 Intrigued, I researched those wetlands and learned that long before there were pig farms or outlets, even before Jimmy Hoffa supposedly ended up there, the Hackensack River was an escape route for runaway slaves. Commercial vessels plied its waters, and its banks were home to many varieties of native flora and fauna. The reed-choked waterway of my childhood is slowly being reclaimed by environmentalists. The place is alive with seldom told stories. I set Hot on the Trail in the Meadowlands.

Thank you for writing a book so powerful and so beautiful that it moved me to reimagine my native state and to discover yours and my grandchildren’s.  

Sincerely,

Jane Isenberg

Dear Dame Agatha Christie,

Since I graduated from college, I’ve gorged on your novels, especially those featuring Miss Jane Marple.  I was a new bride, a new teacher, and new to New Haven Connecticut, and I loved escaping to St. Mary Mead, the prototypical English village where Jane lives. When I first began following her adventures, I’d never heard the word feminism, but even so I just loved the way that wise woman turns the stereotype of the small-town spinster upside down and inside out.

Jane is a cynic and a sophisticate, always ready to believe the worst of seemingly good people, eager to check out her hunches, and determined to punish the evildoers she unmasks. She capitalizes on the sexist and ageist views others have of her to manipulate them into revealing information or otherwise doing her will. She may be graying and wear the decorous dresses and hats we associate with elderly British women, but her eyes and ears are sharp, and her lust for information rivals that of Sherlock. Jane is a classic ratiocinative sleuth wearing a shawl, a chapeau, and a friendly smile instead of a cape, a deerstalker hat, and an arrogant sneer.

Her sleuthing prowess is not the only thing about her that intrigued me back then though. I’d been groomed to attract a husband so I could become a wife and mother, goals that, once accomplished, would fulfill and sustain me in my undoubtedly dependent dotage. Any alternative life plan was unthinkable. But reading about Jane Marple made me think about it. Thanks to her, while reading student papers, burning supper, and doing laundry I dared to wonder “what if” I’d waited a bit to marry.  What if I weren’t putting a husband through grad school? If we didn’t have to live in New Haven? Would I have been able to get work that enabled me to write something besides lesson plans? What if I didn’t worry about my old age just yet? There is no indication that Miss Jane Marple views her single state, her childlessness, or her advanced age as liabilities. 

My own advancing age was, literally, another story.  Decades later my first drenching hot flash hit me with the force of a tsunami of sweat instigated by my dwindling estrogen supply. Dismayed by this soaking and all the follow-up ones and angered by the dearth of menopausal fictional protagonists, I invented such a personage. But I had no story for her, so she remained, sweating and forgetting only inside my head.

Then local politicians forced the first woman president of the community college where I taught to resign. They did so because she refused to hire their ill-prepared relatives and friends to fill academic posts. Faculty protests changed nothing, and I felt helpless. It occurred to me that by insisting on the resignation of this committed educational leader, the politicos had orchestrated her professional demise just as surely as if they had actually murdered her. I envisioned her crumpled body on the ground. Corny as it sounds, the instant I pictured this woman as a corpse, I asked myself, “What would Miss Marple do?” The answer was simple.  She’d expose the killers and bring them to justice. There was the story I needed and it was a mystery. The sweaty character hanging out in my head made her way onto the page as amateur sleuth Bel Barrett, a modern and menopausal version of Jane Marple.

 But writing mysteries like yours did not turn out to be as effortless as reading them. Jane and Hercule are familiar to millions all over the world. People who have never set foot in England know their way around St. Mary Mead and Bertram’s Hotel. Finally, your adroitly plotted puzzles appear seamless, the clues so deftly planted as to be invisible. I will never forget my astonishment at the end of my first reading of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. How had I, a student of The New Criticism, a decoder of Eliot and Faulkner for god’s sake, missed that? I still have much to learn from you about plotting and from Jane about aging, so I always have an excuse to reread your books. Thank you so much for them all.

Sincerely,

Jane Isenberg

Dear John Updike,

 I first encountered your work in The New Yorker in the early Sixties, but I got married anyway. Your take on marriage in Of the Farm, Couples and, of course, the Rabbit series validated my growing fear that the institution I was raised to aspire to was far from the safe haven I expected. It wasn’t as if my parents’ marriage had been blissful, but I figured they were the exception. My cool artsy husband would be different from my volatile lawyer dad, and I was nothing like my reserved and priggish mom. What could those two possibly know of love?

On our wedding day in 1962 when the rabbi solemnly proclaimed my groom, a student of architecture, to be the “architect of my destiny,” I felt a tiny twinge in my gut, but I blamed it on the August heat and the excitement of the occasion. Sadly, my gut was onto something because things went mostly downhill after that. It was only thanks to your books, especially Couples, that I knew I wasn’t alone. In Couples you dissect the marriages, mores, and misperceptions of a group of young marrieds just a bit older than we were who were tumbling in and out of what they called love with astonishing rapidity. In spite of or because of improved contraception, changing attitudes towards divorce, and the displacement of religion and its taboos by psychoanalysis, these folks were serially adulterous, duplicitous, self-deluded, and alcoholic.

Now I’d read Peyton Place as a teenager, so you weren’t the first author to bare the secrets of a community to me. What made the fictional town of Tarbox where Couples takes place and the novel itself different was twofold: the Sixties were different from the Fifties and you made Piet Hanema, the pivotal figure in Couples, not only real, but also, at times, familiar. I could identify with him even while I disapproved. And he is enviable. I envy him his insight and descriptive mastery, your descriptive mastery. To Piet, each face, conversation, sunset, and building has its own defining characteristics and no two vaginas are quite the same.

It is Piet’s endless search for unconditional love that finally destroys his marriage and breaks up his circle of enablers. The novel ends with the church in flames, couples divorcing and recoupling, the Asian scientist dying, and the Jewish couple leaving town. This dénouement seemed almost cheerful to me because the characters know a bit more about love and marriage than they did at the beginning. And a few even know more about themselves. Without self-understanding, the sexual revolution with its promise of foolproof birth control, multiple orgasms, and “free” love was wasted on us all. It took me a while to grasp that. I understood what Portnoy had to complain about, but frankly, it was, at first, hard for me to understand what made the mostly WASP couples of historical and picturesque Tarbox so miserable. I thought they were living the American Dream in lovely homes where they ate gourmet meals and played touch football like the Kennedys.

But you saw that America was changing not only in the bedroom, but also in boardrooms, offices and towns. You saw that our countryside was disappearing. In your books you chronicle the ripple effect of our natural landscape mutating from field to suburb to sprawl on those like Rabbit Angstrom and Piet Hanema. Poor Rabbit’s high school heroics on the basket ball court had not prepared him for the upheavals of the second half of the Twentieth Century any more than his memories of those glory days fortify him against his own racism, stubbornness, and overactive libido. Piet Hanema, a builder who takes pride in the houses he custom crafts, sees himself replaced by developers who mass-produce McMansions. Piet mourns what is lost even as he adapts.

Your admirable ability to capture people writhing in the throes of changes they cannot control inspired me as I wrote about my own teaching experiences in the Sixties and Bel Barrett’s in the Nineties and then again as I formulated a historical novel set in Seattle’s Jewish community during the Klondike Gold Rush and in 1965. Thank you for your incomparable books.

Sincerely,

Jane Isenberg

Dear Jonathan Safran Foer,

 Writing Everything Is Illuminated took courage. I’ve read that your marvel of a novel is a result of research you did on your grandfather’s origin in and escape from a Jewish Ukrainian village depopulated by the Nazis and further destroyed by partisans. It took guts for you to visit the scene of that bloodbath, to reimagine your grandfather and his life before the bloodletting, to make him and his doomed village live again for new generations.

I don’t remember my parents ever telling me about the Holocaust, but I’m sure they tried to explain it to me. Permanently scarred by the seemingly inexplicable shooting of Bambi’s mom, I probably was too afraid to fathom such a thing as genocide let alone to register and remember my parents’ explanation. Even now, I can’t imagine how my grandkids will take it when they learn that there’s more to Jewish history than matzoh, menorahs, and mitzvahs. In the small attic over the garage of our condo is a box of family photos, letters, and mementos, tangible testimony to the stories I didn’t want to listen to when I was   growing up. I’ve schlepped this box around the country for two decades waiting until I feel brave enough to open it.

Meanwhile I think about your quest and the moving novel you wrote about it. In Everything Is Illuminated you juxtapose the horrific with the hilarious. Much of the book’s humor derives from Alex Perchov, the Ukrainian translator who narrates part of your story. His delightfully discombobulated English idioms tickled me, and his perspective ─adolescent, Ukrainian, and gentile─ intensifies the horror of genocide by personalizing it. But Alex is more than a jokey foil who makes the bitter pill of Nazism easier for the reader to swallow. The teenage translator makes a few discoveries about his own ancestors and the stain mass murder leaves even in the minds of those forced to facilitate it.

I too needed a fictional translator of a language I don’t speak, read, or write. When I read Everything Is Illuminated, I was beginning research on a mystery set in Seattle’s Jewish community during the Gold Rush and in 1965. My story features a young Ukrainian woman’s diary written in Yiddish during the Nineteenth Century and translated in 1965 in Seattle. Inspired by Alex and my own ignorance of Yiddish, I made my translator an educated and assimilated Jewish housewife. Rachel Mazursky sees it as her mission to Anglicize the Yiddish scrawl of a semi literate immigrant girl so it will be easily intelligible to nonYiddish speakers. To do this she translates the diary into the unaccented Standard English she’s carefully cultivated and so makes the diary accessible and the diarist credible.

I’m also intrigued by your novel’s “hero,” a young American writer bearing your name. Last summer against the advice of my writing group, I began working on a mystery featuring a fictional writer named Jane Isenberg. Your deft handling of the writer as character will help me as I struggle to weave my own namesake into that story effectively. If I succeed, the resulting novel will be part murder she wrote and part how the hell she wrote it.

Another thing I admire about your book is that you don’t “write down” to some imaginary reader too simple, busy, or lazy to follow a story told in several voices, idioms, and time frames. On the front jacket of the hard cover edition, Nathan Englander calls Everything Is Illuminated “intricate in structure,” and he’s right. That intricacy suits the complexity of the tale you tell and compliments the readers you tell it to by assuming that we can follow it. Bravo!

Please write another novel soon. Meanwhile, thanks for this one.

Sincerely,

Jane Isenberg

Dear James Baldwin,

A good writer transports readers into a different world. Well, thanks to your moving novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, during the summer of 1965 without leaving my couch I spent a memorable few days in Harlem. I’d never dared to venture to Harlem even though I was raised just a few miles away in Passaic, New Jersey. In fact, I’d never read a novel by a black author before. I didn’t know there were any black novelists. Go Tell It hadn’t been on the syllabus of any of the lit courses I took as an English major at Vassar. Your soul searing coming of age novel had been in print for thirteen years, and I’d never even heard of it or you!

But then, after I’d been teaching English in a New Haven public high schoolfor three years, my department chair asked me to apply to a summer program for teachers called Minority Group Literature and Psychology. Your book was on its syllabus. So I finally met John Grimes and his tormented “Negro” family, all struggling to transcend their troubled history in the legally segregated South and to keep their faith on the cold gray streets of the unofficially segregated north.

Amazingly, I identified with John. I too had a patriarchal father prone to outbursts of rage and a meek mother, and I too felt misunderstood by them both. And although I’d never been as poor as John, I recognized the poverty he and his family face as not unlike the poverty my parents remembered from their own ghettoized tenement childhoods. But even then, I understood that John’s family is trapped in his ghetto while my parents had been able to get educations and escape.

Go Tell It on the Mountain not only took me to a part of New York I’d never visited. It picked me right up off my sofa and plopped me smack dab into a pew in the first row of a fundamentalist church there! All around me people sang, swayed, fell down, got up, and even spoke in tongues. They are believers who look to God and Jesus for strength and for sanity and who turn to each other to bear witness to their searches and struggles. The Jews and Christians I knew were not demonstrative.  In fact, I’d never known people whose faith in the deity and fear of the devil preoccupied them and whose membership in a church or synagogue was so important to them. If I had met people like this, they’d kept their beliefs and rituals to themselves, sensing correctly that I wouldn’t understand.

Your novel required me to face my racism and not a moment too soon. I shouldn’t have been surprised to find Go Tell It so lyrical, the work of a poet of despair and desperation with a gift for creating characters who speak as real people do. But if you think of my mind as a bookshelf, back then there was no room on it for black authors. Embarrassing as it is to admit, I was truly surprised that a black person could write such a moving and important book.

If Go Tell It on the Mountain was my passport to Harlem and to the worlds contained there, Giovanni’s Room was a visa to yet another place I’d never been. Oh, I’d been to Paris where this novel is set and which you describe so well, but already in my mid-twenties, I’d never been in the head of a man (or woman) struggling with what today we call sexual identity. I had to revise my blinkered view of same sex relationships.

Reading your memorable books expanded my narrow perspective on the world I live in and write about.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Dear Louisa May Alcott,

You may  be surprised to learn that it was not your pre-chick lit blockbusterLittle Women featuring aspiring writer Jo March that moved me to think I too might someday write. Not that I didn’t love Little Women, but the tough and tomboyish Jo intimidated the hell out of the skinny, bespectacled and wimpy kid I was. And her saintly sibs and mother were totally alien to the only child of my overprotective mom who carried me up the stairs until I was six and who would have died before giving away my breakfast.

No, it was Eight Cousins, your novel in which Rose, a sickly, timid, and orphaned girl experiences a make-over courtesy of her benign guardian uncle and a gaggle of aunts and boy cousins that got me making up stories of my own. Throughout my childhood, I worried that my parents, who argued constantly,would divorce. If they did, I couldn’t imagine either of them having the wit or wherewithal to properly raise me. I pictured myself as good as orphaned, so it was beyond reassuring to see how the parentless Rose, living out my worst fantasy, survives and thrives. And she does this with the help of her globetrotting guardian, Uncle Alec, that sensible, seafaring physician with curly hair, laughing eyes, and trunks full of exotic gifts.

After reading Eight Cousins, I reassured myself by fabricating a future that turned my worst fantasy into a delightful prospect. I began to see my own father’s youngest brother, Uncle Charles, in a whole new way. Mustached and uniformed,my uncle Charles was dashing. And thanks to Uncle Sam and that pesky Hitler, Uncle Charles travelled the world. Like Rose’s guardian, my uncle sent me dolls and stuffed animals from abroad and, when home, he gifted me with pet ducklings, turtles, and finally, the long coveted puppy my mother feared would trigger my allergies. So what if my uncle changed jobs, addresses, and women every few years? I imagined that when my parents divorced, they’d give me to him and he would be my guardian.

Another part of Rose’s experience that encouraged me was how, with fresh air, exercise, and good company she becomes stronger, prettier, and better able to cope socially. Like a true Cinderella, she is rewarded for her innate goodness by her fairy goduncle with the kind of makeover of which I could only dream. And dream of it I did, and so did my ever vigilant mother. Thanks to eye surgery to uncross my eyes and a nose job, I too was eventually transformed, and the memory of Rose’s example legitimized my own entirely cosmetic makeover, an event that took place even though I was sorely lacking in the innate goodness department.

Well, that’s not entirely true. As a girl, I was frequently accused of having an overactive imagination. And now I thank you for nourishing that imagination and so helping me become a writer who, all these years later, makes up skinny orphans of her own and turns brothel madams into guardian angels.

Sincerely,

Jane Isenberg

Dear John D. Macdonald,

You were one of the first men I ever felt guilty about loving. Or maybe it was Travis McGee, your hero, a hunk who actually comes equipped with a heart and brains. When The Deep Blue Good-by, your first Travis McGee mystery, hit the drugstore racks in 1964, I was two years out of Vassar where I’d majored in English and become something of a literary snob. I was teaching English to high school kids, so during the day I shepherded my students through Shakespeare, Dickens, and Hawthorne. But at night at the Laundromat I read Trav. Your paperbacks, with their lurid rainbow of titles were pulp fiction, the adult equivalent of the comic books I’d been forbidden to read as a kid or the smuggled-in True Confessions magazines I’d devoured by flashlight beneath the covers at camp. I castigated myself for loving Trav, but love him I did.

It wasn’t just his good looks, strength, and ability to deal with bad guys and boats that hooked me. Travis is brainy and articulate. He philosophizes about the state of the world, and his colloquial musings reveal intelligence, knowledge, sophistication, and foresight. His loyal sidekick Meyer is smart and savvy too. It was Meyer I had in mind decades later when I began writing The Bel Barrett Mystery Series and dreamed up Bel’s husband Sol. Like Meyer, Sol is a portly economist with a knack for bailing out his trouble prone cohort.

So McGee chooses men friends wisely, but that’s not all. He almost always goes for women who are strong, smart, and brave, and the real gems are also kind and compassionate. I love it that the adjective that Travis uses most frequently to modify the noun women is happy

He likes happy women!

In 1964 I was also ready for a new look at Florida. In ninth grade I’d learned it was the home of a boy who had to shoot his pet fawn, and my tears had blurred his surroundings. Even before that I’d been to Miami Beach once with my great aunt and cousin. I remembered only that iconic sliver of sand lined with hotels. But Trav’s Florida is Fort Lauderdale, the Everglades, the Keys, and lots of other towns, cities, marinas and marshes I’d never thought about.

You made me want to go back to Florida, and I persuaded my husband that we should visit the Keys. When we got to our motel on Islamorada, I felt as if I’d been there before because, of course, thanks to you, I had. I pictured Trav’s houseboat, The Busted Flush, in every marina we passed and wondered what deadly scams were behind the signs of development already pockmarking the islets. I also wondered if I’d ever live in a place I loved enough to write about the way you wrote about Florida.

Then in the late Seventies I moved back to my native New Jersey, to Hoboken. I fell in love with that mile square miracle of a town, once considered a weed in the Garden State, itself the butt of too many bad jokes. When in the Nineties I set The Bel Barrett Mystery Series there, I consciously tried to make Northeastern New Jersey matter to my readers the way you made Florida matter to me.

In 2003, my second husband and I moved to the Puget Sound area of Washington State where for two more years I continued to chronicle Bel’s adventures in New Jersey. On a flight to Fort Lauderdale to visit family, I reread The Scarlet Ruse. Inside the back cover is a bio your son Maynard wrote mentioning that you grew up in Utica, New York and moved to Florida only after you returned from WWII. You too were a transplant! This biographical factoid reminded me that a good writer can learn to know and love a place by writing about it.  I began researching a historical mystery set in Seattle’s Jewish community during the Gold Rush and in 1965.

Thank you for helping me, another transplant, write my way to taking root here.

Sincerely,

Jane Isenberg