The Alternatives to Marriage Project (AtMP) book club has just chosen Single with Attitude as its next book for its online discussion, and I've happily agreed to moderate. I hope you will join in. More on that later. First a little background on how this single-minded academic ended up so smitten with writing.
I was baffled by my first college literature class. For hours, the professor would lead students through the psychology of the writers and their works: Why did the author choose this word and not that? What about that symbolism? What is she really trying to say? Why did he use that allusion? Did you notice how the image at the beginning reemerges at the end in a different form? I remember walking back from those classes and thinking, "Really? The writers were thinking all that while they were writing?"
Yesterday, I had the surreal experience of seeing that same sort of analysis applied to an excerpt from Singled Out. It appeared in the Bedford Reader, a book that has long been used in writing classes and is now in its 10th edition. Now, decades later, I can definitively answer that question I wondered about when I was an undergrad - no, writers are not consciously thinking about all those things when they are writing. Well, at least this writer isn't.
I was honored and humbled to appear in the Bedford Reader, alongside authors such as Maya Angelou, Amy Tan, Anna Quindlen, Alice Walker, Ian Frazier, Joan Didion, Dave Barry (I'd love to be that funny, minus the poop humor), and so many more. Maybe I was included as the confidence-builder, as in, "See, students, you can get published even if you don't write like Amy Tan."
That would probably be the judgment of the people in the workshop I took when I first decided to make the transition from writing for academics to writing for what I hoped would be a much bigger audience. The typical format of these sessions is for each student to read aloud a brief excerpt from their work in progress, then everyone else immediately jumps in with their reactions and critiques. So I read my piece - I think it was my first day ever of doing such a thing - and waited for the reaction. There was silence. Finally, someone asked, with disdain dripping from the last word, "Are you a sociologist?"
How do you know when you really like something? I think it is when you can keep at it, and actually want to keep at it, even when the initial feedback is withering.
Anyway, as I was saying at the outset, the next AtMP book club discussion will feature my latest, a collection of 89 essays, Single with Attitude: Not Your Typical Take on Health and Happiness, Love and Money, Marriage and Friendship. The book includes many of the posts that have appeared here on this Living Single blog, as well as essays I wrote for publications such as Forbes, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the New York Times. (I described the book in more detail in this earlier post.) I have so enjoyed so many of the comments that have been posted to this blog; I hope many of you will join in (or just follow along, if you prefer) and we can all trade ideas. The discussion will be sometime in September (I'll announce the date), so there's time for anyone who is interested to read the book first.
You can get the paperback version of Single with Attitude here or from Amazon. There is also a Kindle version. You can join the AtMP book club here.
Speaking of books, I'll have something to say about two more in upcoming posts. One of them, Consequential Strangers, is by Melinda Blau (fellow PT blogger) and Karen Fingerman, and the other is Thomas F. Coleman's memoir, The Domino Effect: How strategic moves for gay rights, singles' rights, and family diversity have touched the lives of millions. Stay tuned.
[To read other Living Single posts, click here.]
