My best reads of the past 12 months

Have you heard of the really great new website for finding your next read, called Shepherd? No? It’s time you did. They recently asked me to write about my top three reads in the past year. The choice was difficult - I’ve read about 30 books since last autumn. But I did it. You can see the result here, and you can look at the top 100 books picked by the 950 authors they asked to weigh in here. Enjoy!

The Best Writing Advice I Have Ever Received

It came from my husband, who was standing calmly by while I went through what couldn’t have been a first bout of kicking and screaming about some awkward feedback. When he’d had enough, or more likely when I’d simply stopped to breathe for a sec, he said one word: “Try.”

That’s it. When you, or someone who might publish you, aren’t convinced you’re quite there yet with your work, try it a different way, if only just to test the strength of your conviction. I’d be willing to bet many writers, especially ones new to the long game that the vocation is, don’t consider it.

I was talking about it last Tuesday with MA candidates in creative writing at Birmingham City University, telling them how many times I’d reframed my second novel over several years. I didn’t have the evidence on hand, but I’ve just found the printouts of the many first pages of that novel (initially called Babysitting and set in Massachusetts, finally called Yuki Means Happiness and set in Japan) that I did for a U3A talk in 2018.

The first beginning:

It’s irritating having grown up in southeastern Massachusetts. Other writers have such a huge advantage. Indian writers, for example. As long as they don’t get all righteous, they’re golden. One mention of burning cow dung or an arranged marriage, and we’re hooked. We know if we get into a book about rural Louisiana we’ll find it exotic too. One description of Spanish moss, and few words like ‘bayou’, and we go under.

Where I grew up, we had a harbor and a spit and a cranberry bog. Sometimes mist hung over the bog, but it wasn’t mysterious mist. It was nice. It could make you feel nostalgic before you even left. It was irritating.

The second beginning:

Where I grew up, we had a harbor and a spit and a cranberry bog. Sometimes mist hung over the bog, but it wasn’t mysterious mist. It was nice. It could make you feel nostalgic before you even left it. It was irritating. We had hard accents. We dressed alike, or as alike as we could. We were all white except for the small Portuguese community that lived on back roads and ran dog kennels. We girls babysat, the boys mowed lawns and raked leaves, and we were all impressed by the kids who were willing to get up in the dark to walk a paper route before school.

There was one year, though. One year when the whole smell of the town changed for me. My junior year in high school. 1983.

The third beginning:

The fall of 1983 until the summer of 1984 — my junior year in high school — was the year I started looking for signs of marital happiness when I babysat. The first one I found was at the O’Donnells. The kids were asleep, and there was nothing good on TV, so I was prowling. What I found was a literal sign: a tiny picture that one of them had drawn for the other. It was of a little flower — just the flowering part, not the stem or leaves — and around the flower were the words “Barry loves Siobhan loves” so that it was unending. Barry loves Siobhan loves Barry loves Siobhan, around and around and around. I found it in the colorful glass bowl on the coffee table in the living room. I looked at it for a long time, feeling the subject turn to object then back again. Maybe the picture was a spontaneous doodle; maybe it took a lot of effort. Either way, it tattooed itself on my memory as an ideal.

The fourth beginning:

The fall of 1983 until the summer of 1984 — my junior year in high school — was the year I started looking for signs of marital happiness when I babysat. The first one I found was at the O’Donnells, on the weekend before school started. The three kids were asleep. They went down pretty early over there. Megan, the oldest, was six, and prim, and covered in freckles. After I read to her and Robbie, she’d pull her own sheets up to her chin and close her eyes. Robbie was four. He was a big fan of counting things to go to sleep. Sometimes it was bulldozers. One night it was doorknobs. He went to sleep on his side, facing Megan across an alphabet-printed rug. Lindsay was seven months old. She still had hardly any hair, and a rosebud mouth that puckered and juddered when she dreamed.

The fifth beginning:

There’s a lullaby I sing my daughter at the end of the day. It’s not actually a lullaby. It’s a folk song called Habu no Minato, or Habu Harbor, which is a small inlet on the Japanese island of Oshima, but it’s perfect for bedtime. The song starts with the cormorants that come back to the rocky shore at sunset, and the way the harbor glows red as the sun goes down. The singer then wonders what the weather will be like when it comes up again. In the second verse, the fishing boats are hurrying out of the harbor, competing to be first out to sea. The singer reflects that the girls of the island are left behind on the volcano, and wonders what their hearts are like.

The sixth beginning:

It’s 1990 and I’m 24 and I’m standing in the foyer of a beautiful Boston apartment, halfway through an okay cocktail party. The hostess, Claire, is my mother’s best friend. To be honest, I think she’s my mother’s only friend. I’ve agreed to attend because Claire has a syndrome that means she compulsively buys little black dresses. She has wonderful taste, and I want to see the newest one. I’m in the foyer because I’m talking to the only other young person at the party, and when he talks he needs space. He paces, and he wheels his arms around, but it’s not as if he’s crazy, only creative.

The final beginning:

When Naoki Yoshimura walked into Au Bon Pain on 14 July 1996, it led to the worst thing that has ever happened in my life. And also the best. At the time, I merely found it strange to see him again. It had been two and a half years. Still fine-featured and clean-cut, he had aged more than I’d expected.

It would be the second time I’d sat across from him with a job offer between us. The first had been in the autumn of 1993, when he and his wife, Emi, had travelled to Boston from Tokyo so that Emi could give birth in the States and get citizenship for their baby. The West Coast or Hawaii would have been a shorter flight for someone from Japan, but Naoki had done a master’s degree in political science at Harvard, and still had friends in the area.

Here’s the thing: Each iteration of the book worked just fine for me. But as it was under contract to a publisher, they had to be happy, and in the end, I’ll be eternally grateful for the push to keep digging, to keep honing, to keep considering what needed to be revealed when, and at what level of intensity. Finding this balance between the writing experience and what you hope will be the reader’s experience is the fiction-writer’s eternal dance.

It can’t be done in a vacuum. Get feedback. Consider your options. Now, are you ready?

Try.

Return to the Scene of the Climb

The most recent book I’ve worked on wasn’t one of my own novels but the collected writing of my late father, James T. Lester (1927-2010). Called Return to the Scene of the Climb, it comprises three of my otherwise rather quiet dad’s adventures: his participation in the first American Everest expedition in 1963, a two-month road-trip across the US with five of the principal Sherpa climbers from that expedition the summer right after the climb, and his return to Nepal, 35 years later, to see what had become of them. It also includes 78 color photographs from these trips, forwards from Dr. Pasang Yangjee Sherpa and Tom Hornbein, and an introduction by me.

We launched the book in Estes Park, Colorado, on May 24th, right on the edge of the Rocky Mountains. I couldn’t be more thankful to the Estes Valley Library, the wonderful attendees both in the room and online, and Kathy Hornbein, for the warm reception.

Here is the link to the video of the talk-slideshow from that evening. Enjoy the trip!

And here is where to buy the book in the UK, and in the US.

The Sound of It has launched!

The Sound of It is set here in Worcestershire (with one scene taking place in the car park of our local Waitrose!), so I loved launching the book at Droitwich Library last Friday evening. Reading from the book and talking about the writing process with such a warm and supportive crowd was a pleasure and a privilege.

We drank delicious local cider (check out Peopleton Press), and sold the book, its companion coaster, and a wonderful print we commissioned by local artist Ann Taylor.

Keeping it Real About Older Women

I had the great pleasure of being contacted by Shepherd.com, a website that asks authors “to share their favorite books around topics and themes they are passionate about and why they recommend each book. We want to create an experience like wandering around your favorite bookstore but reimagined for the online world.” They had found me because someone recommended Lillian on Life to them, and asked me what sort of list I’d like to create. In this way, “The best books keeping it real for older women” was born. The books I’ve recommended will take you to the US, the UK, Australia, India and Ireland. Enjoy! And while you’re there, check out the intriguing lists by others!

What Would Love Do Now?

It’s a question so many of us have in our heads as we care for our loved ones, be they temporarily ill, or terminally so. I’m thrilled to tell you that I’ll be reading from Absolutely Delicious in an event on 2 April, in Warwick, which is bringing together readings of prose and poetry as well as song, to look at the question.

Please see here for information and tickets. And if you can’t make it, I’ll be reading in another such event in Nottingham in July.

US launch for new novel, Glide

The wonderful Belmont Books in Belmont, Massachusetts will be hosting our US launch on November 17 at 6:30pm EST. I’ll be discussing the development of the book and doing a reading, and Andrew Gurnett, who created the book’s moody images, will talk about the visual aspect of the collaboration. Do come! You can register, and also pre-order a copy of the book, here.

Absolutely Delicious at the Evesham Festival of Words

On August 20th at 2:30pm, I’ll be talking about writing my memoir of three deaths, about death positivity, and about writing fiction vs writing non-fiction, at the Evesham Festival of Words. I’m so pleased to have been invited by this very lively festival, which is conveniently quite close to home! Booking info here.

Finalist in the National Indie Excellence Awards!

It was very exciting to learn that Absolutely Delicious had been chosen as a finalist in the Death & Dying category at the National Indie Excellence Awards, an American program that lifts independently published books into the light. I’ll be putting the gold sticker on the covers of the books I sell with great big smile!

You can see all the fascinating finalists here.

Absolutely Delicious published!

My memoir, Absolutely Delicious: A Chronicle of Extraordinary Dying, came out on October 22nd. Being my own publisher was a huge challenge - a fantastic learning experience, and a headache! But the response to the book has been wonderful. The first organisation to write a review was Marie Curie. That was followed by an interview on BBC Radio Hereford and Worcester, and then a column in the Salisbury Journal by Tom Bromley. There’s more to come.

While I think that most people both in the US and in the UK would agree that we are largely death-denying societies, there is a lot going on to help remedy that situation, to normalise death, to educate about death, to listen to dying wishes, to plan in advance. It has been a privilege to come into contact with the people driving this development, and I look forward to whatever having published this book brings.

Illustration from Absolutely Delicious by Mary Ann Frye

My Opposite Hand

In April of 2018, repetitive strain in my right hand (my writing hand) had me teaching myself to write with my left. The process was both intellectually fascinating and emotionally healing. Just this week, Bookanista.com published my personal essay about it, which you can read here.

“Knowing how to write with my right was no help at all. Holding the pen in my left, I couldn’t even imagine my usual way of writing the letter A, let alone any of my flourishes and shortcuts. What my left hand did was try to write the way I was taught in elementary school. At first it was spindly, more like the writing of an old person, but over time it began to look more like that of my fourth- or fifth-grade self.

“I didn’t feel like a child as I wrote, though. I felt thoughtful, partly because I could only grasp a few of the words I was transcribing at a time. So much of my mind was wrapped up in forming the letters. This meant very close reading, leading to revelations that wouldn’t have arisen on faster reading. But I’m sure this thoughtfulness also stemmed from accessing different brain areas, and from a slow emotional reveal that I will get to in a moment.”

The Victoria Literary Festismall!

Unable, or perhaps unwilling, to get myself organized either to pitch my workshop to the many wonderful literary festivals around Britain or to buy tickets and travel to them at the moment, I thought, “I know writers. Why don’t I bring the festival to me?”

The fact that all four of the people I invited were available and keen made the project feel destined for success. I hadn’t given myself a lot of lead time, but when your project is tiny, and you’re not a perfectionist, that’s okay! The only thing that took any real effort was getting the t-shirts printed correctly.

The date for the ‘festismall’ (my husband’s brilliant idea for a name) was yesterday - Sunday, January 12th. On Saturday I tidied and cleaned, baked cookies and sorted out the festival goody bags. I had four random cotton shopping bags hanging around (who doesn’t?), and into each went a t-shirt, a copy of my short story collection, an Ian Rankin paperback (for some reason we had four duplicate copies), an anthology that one of the invited writers and I both had a story in, and some ginger-molasses cookies tied up with a ribbon I’d had in my sewing box for years.

We would be sitting around the round table in the front room we use as a gallery for my husband Andrew Gurnett’s wonderful photography, and we’d be using the blanket chest in there for a merchandise table everyone could put their books for sale on.

We were seated around the table and ready to get sharing at 1:30pm. Kate Innes, author of poetry and medieval literary adventure, started us off, talking about choosing the right point of view when constructing a book, and what happens, both to the writer and then to the reader, when it works well, and when it doesn’t. She’s getting into the third book of her trilogy, and thinking about these issues.

We moved on from discussion of POV to discussion of structure and style. Sarah James, writer of poetry and short fiction and the main editor at V. Press, opened up to us about her struggles with her “difficult manuscript” (and don’t we all have those hanging around as well?). We talked again about how to balance what we seek to experience as a writer with what readers seek to experience.

Up next was Suz Korb, a prolific writer of a mix of romance, sci-fi and YA fiction, and indie publisher at Keystone Literary. Suz talked us through her writing process, which includes a lot of communication with her readers on social media, and also through her publishing process, which includes paperbacks, ebooks, and audio books. She made self-promotion sound encouragingly easy.

When it came to my turn to share, I talked about the three-stage feedback (or lack of feedback) process I went through with my most recent fiction manuscript. We talked about what sort of feedback is helpful, and how and when we need to make changes. I was the photographer for the day, so I don’t have a photo of me speaking, but here’s a nice one of Andy and me, with Andy wearing the festismall security hoodie we made for him for fun!

I met Chris Newson, our final speaker, when he was general manager at Marshall Cavendish in Singapore and they were publishing my book on presentation skills. Amazingly, we both relocated from Asia to the Worcester area of England within a year of each other. He’s got his fingers in many publishing pies, including commissioning for a non-fiction publisher and even acting as agent for people he knows with marketable projects. He talked to us about the changes technology has offered writers, and we peppered him with questions about what his contacts are looking for.

We conversed like this for over four hours, and the time flew. We put the kettle on for hot drinks only once. Otherwise it was talk talk talk, with a bit of nibbling on cucumber and salmon sandwiches, Twiglets, cookies, and chocolates that Suz had brought.

Andy took our group photo . . .

In the bottom right corner of this photo is the nose of our senile miniature schnauzer, Jasper, wondering why we are all in a row.

. . . then we did some book buying and swapping, hugged each other warmly, and dispersed.

I don’t think I could be happier about how the afternoon went. I’m so glad I brought the festival to me, and I will certainly do it again. Thank you Kate, Sarah, Suz and Chris for making the trip giving me so much food for thought!

Surprise! Lillian on Life on BBC Radio 4's A Good Read!

The other day I had a text from my neighbor telling me she’d almost driven into a hedge because she’d heard my first novel being discussed on the radio. I would have driven into a hedge too, as I hadn’t had any warning that Lillian on Life was Harriett Gilbert’s pick for discussion with Mathew Baynton and Aasmah Mir on BBC4’s A Good Read. Listen to the whole show for discussions of Iain Banks’s The Crow Road and George Saunders’s Tenth of December as well. Jump to their thoughts on Lillian from 18m30s.

Five Stories

Yesterday evening was the final step in the wonderful process of the West Midlands Readers’ Network 2018 Short Story Commissions project. Having visited the reading groups we were paired with, the four other writers and I took time over the summer to write our stories, inspired by our discussions of the narrative elements they were interested in. We returned to our groups to read them our stories in the early autumn, and yesterday we came together at the Birmingham and Midland Institute to speak with the wonderful organiser, Roz Goddard, about the process, and read excerpts from our stories to an audience made up of members of the participating reading groups, friends and family.

‘None the Wiser’ by Kate Innes takes place in a haberdashery in recently bombed WWII Shrewsbury.

‘The Government is in Place’ by Susan James has a Hungarian woman reflecting on the shattered hopes of the 1956 uprising, and wondering whether or not to trust Gorbachev.

‘The Last of the Real Men’ by Paul McDonald offers us the dying minutes of an offensive and unrepentant comedian in a future where heterosexuality is no longer the norm.

‘Milly’ by Ashok Patel follows the development of the relationship of a Shropshire boy with his childhood playmate, and with his embarrassingly old parents.

In my story, ‘Tiyanak’, an elderly widow hears the cries of an infant every night, and finds help for her troubles when she meets the Filipino carer next door.

A Super Time in Salisbury

It was a joy and an honor, very challenging and very fun, to be part of the Salisbury Literary Festival again this year. Not only did I get to run a mini version of my Improv for Writers workshop as a warm-up activity to the Writers’ Day on Sunday, I also interviewed three TERRIFIC authors – Claire Fuller, Caoilinn Hughes, and Matt Haig – on Saturday. (Thank you to Andrew Gurnett for the great photos!)

Here is Claire Fuller reading from her extremely atmospheric, tense new novel, Bitter Orange. Her other novels are Swimming Lessons and Our Endless Numbered Days.

And here is Caoilinn Hughes discussing her debut, Orchid & the Wasp, and how difficult it is for people to accept an ambitious female character whose decisions can’t be traced back to some sort of trauma. She is also a poet, with an award-winning collection called Gathering Evidence.

The setting for the evening event – Salisbury Cathedral – was so dramatic, it deserves its own photograph.

Hundreds of people await the arrival of Matt Haig, whose newest work for adults, Notes on a Nervous Planet, offers thoughts and strategies for anxious readers. His just-out book for kids, The Truth Pixie, does the same, via a charming story.

Matt Haig, on stage! It was an exciting experience to be up there with him, listening to him be so candid, and so funny, about his mental health struggles and the various ways forward. Just look at my expression. There were lots of wonderful surprises in his talk!

Salisbury Literary Festival, October 17-21

Next up on the calendar is participation in the second Salisbury Literary Festival. I enjoyed it so much last year, when I interviewed Sarah Winman and ran my Improv for Writers workshop.

This year I’ll have the honor of being in discussion with Claire Fuller and Caoilinn Hughes on the Saturday afternoon, and with Matt Haig in the evening. On Sunday morning I’ll run my workshop again.

Come if you can!

Talking About Lily May

Oh what a feeling it was to have my short story about the awkward crush ageing band-leader Sam has on lovely young back-up singer Lily May performed by actor Tom Clarke-Hill at The Warehouse Cafe in Birmingham this past Monday! Organized by Brum Radio, the event also featured the poetry of Darren Cannan and the music of James Summerfield. ‘Talking About Lily May’ includes the lyrics to a song I wrote for the story, and the amazing Tom Clarke-Hill and Phil Bond both wrote the music for the song and performed it with verve and virtuosity.

Watch this space. I’ll soon have a link to the recording of the event!

Ready to catch my train to Birmingham before the show, heavily weighed down by many copies of my short-story collection and two bottles of wine.

Phil Bond and Tom Clarke-Hill warming up before showtime.

Walking in Beauty, Saturday 28 July, London

It is a great honor to have been invited to do some live non-fiction storytelling in London!

Billed as 'A night of unforgettable stories of strength, courage, beauty and love', Walking in Beauty offers the audience seven international women opening up about how they developed their concept of beauty, and what they value. I look forward to being on stage at Theatre Delicatessen on Saturday, July 28th, both because it will be a reunion for me with some wonderful people I knew in Singapore, and because some of the storytellers will be new to me. 

Tickets are £10 in advance, £15 on the door, will concessions as well.

As my trendy son likes to say, 'Come through!'

Improv for Writers at the Dublin International Literature Festival

Guess who will be running her Improv for Writers workshop on May 20th at the Dublin International Literature Festival – at the International Comedy Club, no less?? I'm so excited to be travelling to Ireland for the first time, with Dublin as my first port of call. 

The workshop is part of the festival's Stories from the City theme, so we'll be improvising stories that draw from cities both experienced and imagined.

Details here: http://ilfdublin.com/events/workshop-improv-for-writers

Talk at Daunt Books in Hampstead, March 8th

London readers, I'd love to meet you! If you'd like to meet me too, come to Daunt Books on South End Road in Hampstead at 6.30pm on March 8th. For the small fee we'll be able to talk AND have a drink. Hope to see you there!