Finding Vermeer?

The FBI arrested the murderous 81-year-old Boston mob boss Whitey Bulger this morning at his condo in Santa Monica, where he had been living with his girlfriend in broad daylight despite being on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List for the past sixteen years. This is fantstic news!

Why do I care? Because I am among those who believe that he may hold some key information about the unsolved Gardner Museum heist, which is central to the plot in my 1999 novel The Music Lesson (just reissued this year from Broadway in an attractive new paperback edition). Does the Gardner get Vermeer's "The Concert" back on its wall where the blank space has been maintained ever since it was stolen in 1990? Fingers crossed.

Words I Never Use

This is, I suppose, the precise opposite of a staircase thought, or perhaps there should be a term for something you are glad you haven't said. Is there such a term? Anyway, there are certain words I simply cannot abide. In The Memory Of All That, I went out of my way to avoid "scion," "prestigious," and "socialite." Those very words have already been used, and I am sure will continue to be used, by others who have something to say about the book.

My word prejudices run deep and wide. For example, I am very unfond of "veggies." It's familial. My sister-in-law feels faint at the mention of "brunch." One of my daughters gets the cringies from "moist." What are your no-no-no-never! words?

Literally Walking Off the Page

The first three "industry" reviews for The Memory Of All That: George Gershwin, Kay Swift, and My Family's Legacy Of Infidelities have come in. They are positive, selling reviews, to be sure, but two of them are the kind of reviews the publisher is happier about than is the author. Here's why:

Publishers Weekly called the book "a wry and engaging portrait of a powerful, talented, but troubled family." It summarizes certain elements of the story, concluding with this: "The most touching passages describe the impact of unavailable adults on Weber (she was left alone for five days on a film set) and Weber's relationship with Swift, who took her to Broadway shows, Central Park, and Schrafft's soda fountain." No characterizing final conclusion, no context with regard to my novels, and not a word about the actual writing. A strangely incomplete review. Not to be ungrateful for the coverage, but, hey, PW reviewer, what did you think of the book?

Kirkus had a more knowing reviewer on the case, I suspect, though that review was also muted and a bit ungenerous. After some useful summarizing and quoting, the review concludes: "The book is strongest in its rich details of a dazzling but painful family past fraught with betrayals, infidelities and other assorted dysfunctions, including-in the figure of art historian Aby Warburg-mental illness. However, Weber is overly reliant on historical narrative to convey a very personal recollection, which creates an unintentionally brittle objectivity that makes it difficult for readers to connect with either Weber or her account, except at a distance. Illuminating but often dry." I don't agree with this last opinion at all! But I certainly welcome a review that has something to say.

Booklist gets The Memory Of All That best of these three. Here is the whole review: "Novelist Weber (True Confections, 2010; Triangle, 2006) mines her rich family history, hitting the mother lode of pedigreed romances and remembrances. While it may be a stretch to call the infidelities of several generations love stories, many of the eccentric characters on Weber’s family tree are more than a touch quixotic, imbuing their often sordid relationships with an intriguing aura of romance. With a novelist’s light, sure touch, Weber propels this fascinating family memoir with stories and recollections of the prominent relatives who informed her life. Grandmother Kay Swift, the first female Broadway composer and George Gershwin’s longtime lover; grandpa James Paul Warburg, FDR’s economic adviser; and daddy Sidney Kaufman, serial womanizer, unconventional filmmaker, and producer of the first feature film that literally smelled, thanks to a process called Aromarama, literally walk off the pages of this captivating multigenerational saga."

THANK YOU, thank you! Booklist reviewer, for your appreciation, and for recognizing that I am a novelist (it is likely that the PW and Kirkus reviewers had little or no awareness of my five novels), and for suggesting that the memoir is actually a literary work. The unintentionally hilarious "literally walk off the pages" is entirely forgiven. (Book critics no doubt have staircase thoughts of their own.)

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?