Memo to that Certain Family Member

Dear You Know Who You Are:

Perhaps you wouldn't lie awake nights wondering if my forthcoming family memoir has "all those bad things" in it if you hadn't done all those bad things in your long, long life! Give it a thought one of these 3 a.m.s between now and pub date in July.

I am far kinder and also far more discreet than you deserve. For example, I just wrote that.

The Final Moment Before Staircase Writing Sets In

I have turned in all corrections to second pass pages for The Memory Of All That. From this moment on, anything else I want to include in those pages will consist of staircase writing here.

The last new writing, in these final corrections, was a parenthetical sentence about my great-aunt the psychoanalyst, inserted into a late chapter in a paragraph about the imperious old ladies in my family and their hierarchies: (Bettina always cheated ferociously at croquet, to ensure that Nick won, she came in second, and I finished last.)

Say, Dat's Still Tasty

Bound galleys are in for The Memory Of All That, which pubs in July. The paperback of True Confections came out just before Christmas. So while it still feels like a new book to me, now that spring has sprung, the world has pretty much moved on. For the first time in three years I won't be attending the huge candy convention in Chicago next month.

I am ready to move on, but before I turn all my meta writing energies to my forthcoming book (while devoting my actual writing energies to my new novel in progress), this is just a reminder that there is a website for Zip's Candies, and at the website there is a contest that is still live, with very beautiful "Say, Dat's Tasty!" t-shirt prizes still available to anyone and everyone who submits an entry. Please visit Zip's Candies , and please enter the contest! And please tell everyone you know!

The 100th Anniversary of the Triangle Fire

Today is the centenary of the fire at the Triangle Waist Company. On March 25th, 1911, at least 146 workers, most of them young immigrant women, died because the owners of the garment factory sweatshop where they labored over their sewing machines cared more about profits than about the safety of workers. A fire broke out. Within sixteen minutes, about half of those who died had jumped to their deaths from the ninth floor, while the rest died in the fire that roared through the top three floors of the ten-story Asch Building, just a block west of Washington Square.

The Triangle fire is at the heart of my 2006 novel Triangle, which I was inspired to write because my paternal grandmother, Pauline Gottesfeld Kaufman, finished buttonholes at the Triangle Waist Company in 1909. I am in the HBO documentary about the fire discussing Pauline's violent encounter with a policeman during the uprising of the 20,000 garment workers in 1909.

I don't have much new to say about this event that has not already been said very well by so many other people as the Triangle fire centenary has loomed (other than to insist that the proper term for a 100th anniversary is "centenary" and not "centennial," but I am a lone voice in the wilderness of imprecision.) I have participated in a number of panels and other events, and I spoke this week at Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue, where my fancier Warburgian maternal forebears were "twice-a-year" Jews.

What are the lessons of the Triangle fire? I fear we are still learning them. Today, please stop to think about where your clothing comes from, and think about the lives of the people who made what you are wearing right now. What do they eat? Where do they sleep? What are their living conditions? What are their working conditions? How much do they get paid? Garment factory workers, many of them children, are still dying in garment factory fires that are shockingly familiar: Locked doors, undocumented workers employed by sub-contractors, extremely unsafe conditions, a fire.

The only difference between 1911 and 2011 is that in this era of outsourcing, now that so many of our cheap garments are made in unsafe factories in third world countries, we outsource our tragedies, too. Are you comfortable in those clothes?

Just a Few STETs, Please

The copy edited manuscript for my forthcoming memoir, The Memory of All That, arrived on my doorstep this morning. Working with this, I have to complete all final revising in the next few days, because from here it goes to typesetting. Next time I see these words they will be set in first pass pages (those are the pages from which galleys are made and sent to reviewers), and no further changes will be possible beyond the corrections of typesetting errors.

I have been anxious about the copy edit because, frankly, strictly entre nous, I had some very terrible copy editing on my last two books. Great copy editing is an elegant, subtle art. I absolutely love skilled copy editing which helps the author say and mean what she means to say. Copy editing is essential. It saves the author from repetitions and other artifacts of revision and rewriting, and it saves the author from her own weaknesses. (I have a tin ear for "that" and "which," no matter how many times I check Strunk and White.)

Bad copy editing, on the other hand, introduces new errors while overlooking existing errors. Bad copy editing cites Wikipedia as a definitive source. Bad copy editing betrays cluelessness about the author's tone and style while revealing far too much about the copy editor's own limitations (and, perhaps, failed ambitions). Bad copy editing is painful. It takes time and is horribly enervating. Bad copy editing causes one to wear out pencils writing STET over and over. Stet is Latin for "let it stand," which is to say, it is a veto of a correction. But if you have to write it too many times on a manuscript you begin to think it is actually the Latin for "fuck off."

The fantastic news of the day is that I had a fabulous copy editor for this manuscript! The copy edits are reasonable, attentive, thorough, and intelligent. They are also respectful of the author's intentions, for which I am profoundly grateful. I have work to do, the kind of work I love, and I am diving in now.

Meaning More Than I Meant, or Maybe Just a Lot of Cats

When you have published five novels, it is possible to look back over the elements common to each and to discern certain themes and patterns that weren't intentionally planted to be part of a larger scheme, but there they are.

One common element in all my novels is cats. In my first novel, Objects etc, a cat falls out a window and dies, and another cat is seen sleeping in a shop window. In The Music Lesson, my second novel, there are a multitude of cats thronging the Irish cottage of a significant character. In my third novel, The Little Women, there is one cat named Tiggy Winkle and another named Miss Demeanor. In Triangle, there is a cat, Joe Green, short for Giuseppe Verdi (nobody got that, I mean nobody), who almost falls off a high ledge to his death, but then he doesn't. In True Confections, there is a cat who dies horribly as the consequence of a fire. (Fire is a topic for another day.)

So what's with all the cats? Maybe nothing momentous. I love cats. See above for a glimpse of my cat Katinka, the not-unlarge Siberian. Cats signify for me, and so why shouldn't they be present in the lives of my characters? In effect, cats are simply also characters in all of my novels so far.

The Music Lesson redux

This week, the new Broadway paperback of my second novel, The Music Lesson, was published. I am thrilled that my 1999 novel has steadily appealed to readers in more than a dozen languages and has been a perennial with book groups. The Picador paperback ran through eleven printings, and I am optimistic that the Broadway edition will have a nice long shelf life.

I am especially happy that Random House/Broadway are my new paperback publishers, with True Confections just out from Broadway, and with my first novel, Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, scheduled to appear later this year, in July. It is a major big deal for a novelist to have an entire backlist in print. It's a terrific vote of confidence from the publisher, and I am grateful.