Pamela Jane's Blog

Note: This was originally published by The New York Daily News

I wasn’t ready to date after my husband died suddenly a year ago. I felt heartsick. But I also felt lonely. I had spent the past thirty years writing alone in a room which was great when I had a family who magically materialized at the end of the day. But now, with my husband gone and my daughter off to college, writing alone in a room all day no longer seemed appealing. I needed someone to talk and laugh with, face to face.
Or F2F as they say on the dating sites.

Online dating sites were offering Valentine’s specials:
“Valentine’s Day is a celebration of love and friendship.
Join now and get two months free!”

That sounded good, so I signed up, choosing “female seeking male” from the dropdown menu. I added that I was looking only for friendship.

Shortly after I filled out my profile, I got an alert, “Robert flirted with you! Flirt back!”

The flirt-alert, I discovered, is a button. It provides no opportunity for nuances or fine-tuning. You either flirt or you don’t.

I didn’t.

To make communication even more clumsy, when you hit “reply” to a question, a pre-composed message pops up. If you aren’t careful you can end up sending a message like, “Let’s meet F2F!” when all you wanted to say was “Hi.”

In The Politics of the English Language, George Orwell notes that “prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.”

The tacked-together phrases on the dating site are a hazard. It’s like trying not to step on the end of a loose board that could pop up and clunk you on the head, which is exactly what happened when I inadvertently sent a man called George a message.

“I like hugs!” it read. After that I had a hard time explaining to George why I didn’t want sex. When I told him that I was still in love with my husband, he argued as though it was a matter of semantics (how did I define “love”?), or a metaphysical impossibility. I could not be in love with a man who was dead, he insisted. (Actually, he whined.)

At this point it finally got through to me that men on dating sites are looking for romance, especially around Valentine’s Day.

This got me thinking. If I couldn’t find a man who was OK without the sex, maybe I could find a woman. So I changed my profile setting to female-seeking-female.
It’s the chicken-salad sandwich strategy from the famous diner scene in Five Easy Pieces.

Bobby, played by Jack Nicholson, is sitting in a diner, arguing with a waitress, who informs him that he cannot have a side order of toast.

Bobby: What do you mean, you don't have side orders of toast? You make sandwiches, don't you?
The waitress informs him that she doesn’t make the rules.

Bobby: Okay, I'll make it as easy for you as I can. Give me… a chicken salad sandwich on wheat toast -- no butter, no mayonnaise, no lettuce -- and a cup of coffee.
The waitress writes down the order. “Anything else?” she asks.

Bobby: Now all you have to do is hold the chicken, bring me the toast, charge me for the sandwich, and you haven't broken any rules.

I didn’t break any rules either, and I found two new women friends who are happy just to be friends, just in time for Valentine’s Day.

Bobby rigged the system by breaking up Orwell’s prefab henhouse (or, in his case, diner menu) then reassembling it without the chicken. I performed a similar sleight of hand with the dating site.

My only casualty was the rooster.

For a long time I puzzled over how I managed to go from a hopeless screw-up in school to a hardworking, disciplined writer as an adult. After considering it for 50 years or so, I came to the realization that I had been a very hardworking little girl. In fact I was a workaholic, striving, in my 4-year-old way, to decipher the mysteries of the universe and the meaning of life. What was real? What was illusory?

Sometimes, in the middle of the night, it seemed as if nothing was real, that sunlight and houses and stop signs were pictures painted on a curtain. Behind the curtain was a black hole—nothingness. We kids weren’t supposed to know about the nothingness. Late at night, when we were asleep, the grown-ups touched up or repaired any wrinkles or tears in the curtain so that we wouldn’t suspect what lay behind the seamless surface. Even my consciousness, my essential being, might be part of the illusion. I lay in the dark, prickling with panic, praying for daylight and the sounds of activity and life to dispel the terrifying specter of nonexistence.

Then, in the middle of wrestling with these dilemmas—I admit I wasn’t making much progress—something terrible happened.

My parents sent me to kindergarten.

Kindergarten came as a rude interruption to my existential preoccupations. What did finger painting or building blocks have to do with the questions that haunted me? It wasn’t that I didn’t want to play; I just didn’t want to play with blocks and finger paint, at least not exclusively. I wanted to play with ideas.

I felt hamstrung. This didn’t bode well for future academic achievement. And, sure enough, by third grade I was in the slow reading group. Though I loved to read, I hadn’t read the stories or answered the questions in the workbook. I didn’t want to answer those questions. I had too many of my own.

Numbers were even more infuriating, especially when concealed in story-problems about children going to the store to buy candy. Just when you were getting interested in the candy-store adventure, they yanked the narrative out from under you and presented you with a math problem involving money laundering.

I hated school so much that I took to heating up the thermometer on the radiator so my parents would think I had a temperature and let me stay home. This worked well, except for the time the thermometer registered 105 degrees and my mother took me to the emergency room.

Because no one talked about the ideas that absorbed me, and because I couldn’t begin to articulate them, I felt invisible, as though I didn’t exist. The more ignored and invisible I felt, the richer my interior life became. Standing on the beach during summer vacations, I imagined that I alone understood the secret language of waves as each one broke, breathing its brief tale before sinking back into oblivion. I might be flunking out of school, but in my inner life I reigned supreme—author of existence, teller of tales, master of tides. Through it all I was striving to transform reality, answer impossible questions, and create a story out of a big mess.

In other words, I was working to become a writer.
(Wall Street Journal May, 2018

This is an excerpt from the book I am currently finishing by the same title. Original published by "Mother's Always Write."

When my family moved to Florence for a year, I had my new Italian life all planned – long afternoons gazing at masterpieces of Italian art at the famous Uffizi, leisurely evenings at a trattoria, sipping wine. In the mornings, I would work on the memoir I was writing (no distractions like back home!) while my husband taught at NYU’s Florence Campus, and our four-year old, Annelise, attended an Italian preschool. This was going to be so great!

Walking with Annelise to school that first morning, the gold Italian light shone softly on the ancient, shuttered buildings. We passed a man in a leather apron standing outside a shoe repair shop, a fragrant panneteria, and a pint-sized piazza that gave the neighborhood a charming small-town feeling. My spirits soared. What a great experience for all of us!

At home, I settled down in the breezy, light-filled living room to write. But suddenly noises exploded in the apartment overhead – pounding, crashing, hammering sounds that shook the whole building. It felt like brain surgery without the anesthetic.

I hurried downstairs and to find Carlo, the super.

“How much longer will this noise last?” I asked in my broken Italian. (Actually “broken” implies it can be fixed; my Italian was more smashed.)

Fortunately, Carlo spoke a little English,

“Trouble,” he said, “difficule – aqua – water leak.”

“But how long will it take to fix it?”

Carlo held up a finger. “Oggi. Today.”

One day? I could handle that.

Little did I know the noise would never stop. Florence is in a chronic state of pounding, chiseling, pulverizing, and blasting. I remembered my conversations with Susan, NYU’s Florence real estate agent, before we arrived.

“I’m not a city person,” I explained. “We’d like to live in the countryside or a small town outside of Florence.”

“You don’t understand!” said Susan. “Florence isn’t really a city. You’re thinking of New York. Florence is European. The pace of life is slow and gentle. You’ll love it.”

Susan had lied. Our apartment had 150 mopeds parked outside that sputtered and roared at all hours. Garbage trucks and street-cleaning machines churned away, trucks and buses zoomed past, and the ear-splitting European sirens reminded me of WWII movies about Nazi Germany. Back in the living room after talking to Carlo, I gritted my teeth and jammed earplugs made from toilet paper into my ears. I was going to finish this memoir.

But a week later, the noise was starting to get to me. To make matters worse, I was having hot flashes at night. This wasn’t the Florence I’d dreamed of and it wasn’t the self I’d dreamed of either – my new Italian self. I was my same old American self, tired and stressed out, and feeling like a bad mother with no energy for a bouncy four-year old. As for Annelise’s fabulous Italian adventure, all the kids at her school still sucked pacifiers, even the older ones. Annelise had given up her pacifier at three-months; now she spent afternoons wheeling herself around our apartment in her stroller, sucking her binky.

The next day, the toilet added to cacophony by making loud gurgling noises. I called Carlo, and soon I heard the plumber’s heavy boots thumping up the stairs. Quickly, I ran to my Italian dictionary and looked up the word for “repeat” so I could explain what was wrong with the toilet. When I told him, the plumber looked startled. I ran and checked my Italian dictionary again. Oh no! I told him the toilet was repenting.

The toilet may repent, but I don’t want to be there when it happens.

While the plumber was banging around in the bathroom, Annelise appeared, carrying a broom and a dustpan.

“Mommy, I swept the balcony all by myself!” she said proudly.

“What did you do with the dirt?”

“I threw it over the railing,” said Annelise airily.

I peered down at the white sheets billowing in the breeze.

From the courtyard below, a lady started yelling.

“Mio Dio, guarda le mie lenzuola pulite!”

At that moment, the plumber burst into an aria, and the telephone and doorbell rang at the same time.

I was trapped in the middle of a comic Italian opera.

I let Carlo in, and answered the phone.

It was Marguerite, wife of the rector of the American Church, whom I had met the week before.

“I know a cook who will take you for a ride,” she said, when I picked up.

Oh, what the heck, I thought. I’ll go for it. I could use any help at all, even if it meant getting taken to the cleaners by a crooked cook.

What Marguerite meant, it turned out, was that the Cooks, a family who lived around the corner, could give us a ride to the American Church on Sunday.

In the days that followed, I felt tired and disheartened. I cried when I couldn’t find thread to sew on a button, and sent desperate emails to friends back home.

“How can you not like Florence?” they responded. “It’s so beautiful.”

I didn’t need beautiful. I needed help – A surrogate mom, a crooked cook, a robot, anything!

A robot –­ that was it! I invented a game where Annelise dialed a special telephone number to order a robot mommy. I would disappear around the corner of the kitchen, and come back, mechanized but cheerful. The game helped me get out of my own skin, at least psychologically, and Annelise loved calling the robot agency.

“Lucretia already got the speedy one,” I’d say. “We have to call earlier tomorrow.”

One afternoon when I was feeling especially cranky, Annelise asked to play the robot game.

“No, I’m too tired,” I snapped.

Suddenly my normally cheerful four-year old burst into noisy howls.

“I want my robot Mommy!”

Yikes. What had I done to this poor kid?

I decided to call a psychologist who, like John, had come to Florence for a semester to teach. I had met her at a party at La Pietra, NYU’s 14th century villa, the night we arrived. Tracy, who also had a four-year old, was probably having a hard time too. We’d commiserate and exchange stories. I’d realize I wasn’t alone, that I was just a regular mom, with universal mom-type problems.

I dialed her number and asked sympathetically how she was doing.

“Oh, Alexia and I are fine!” Tracy gushed. “We just got back from the Duomo and Alexia is making stained glass windows from colored paper.”

Great. Alexia was visiting the Duomo and making stained glass windows while my kid wheeled herself around the apartment in her stroller sucking a pacifier.

Now I really felt like a great mom.

Eventually, in March, we moved to an apartment in a villa outside of Florence, where Annelise fiesole
attended a preschool taught by a mischievous, fun-loving nun. And I discovered that the best writing I did in Italy was while walking; the journal I dictated on my portable recorder had a lilting, rolling gait, and the pictures of rural life I glimpsed on my walks in the hills were like paintings. But it would be a long time before I realized that, in spite of my steely determination finish my memoir and shut out the rest of the world that year, what I was really writing about was Florence, and being a mom when you’re too tired to do it, about hard times and new adventures, and of course what I knew all along – that no one feels sorry for you when you’re living in Tuscany.

“Dreams are real while we have them; can we say more of life?” –anonymous

My seventeenth year was a nightmare (a waking one!) My parents were in the middle of a bitter divorce, my mother had recently had a nervous breakdown, and my dad was having an affair. Late at night, through the heating vent by my bed, I could hear my father’s angry voice and my mother’s sobs in the downstairs rec room. It was a painful and volatile time but my older brother, who was away at college, kept urging me to keep our parents together and our family intact. I had no idea how I was supposed to accomplish this. Further more, I didn’t want to.

“I’m not interested in all this parent shit,” I wrote back. “I just want to get out of here.”

It would take me decades to discover that this was not the voice of a callous teenager but of a heart-broken young woman who cared passionately about all that “parent shit.” I did not learn this from distance and adult perspective; I learned it from my dreams.

When I was beginning to write my memoir and examining this chapter of my life, I returned again and again in my dreams to the brick bungalow in suburban Detroit where my family and I lived when I was a teenager. In these dreams, I begged my father to buy back our house (it had been sold shortly after I graduated from high school.) It bothered my dream-self that my family had been shattered and our home sold when I was fragile myself, and most needed the structure and protection of a home and a family.

“Our family is splintered,” I told Dad in my dreams. “We need a physical place to come together in dreams, to act out old dramas and try out new ones.” (Interestingly, I found out later that our old house was actually up for sale again while I was having these dreams.)

It took a lot of arguing to persuade my dream-dad to buy a dream house. When he finally gave in and bought an old frame colonial with a massivehouse for sale front hall and a fireplace (truly a dream house for me) I felt a deep sense of healing that spilled over into waking life. I was piecing myself and my life back together again, both in my dreams and in my memoir.

In other dreams, I’ve revisited scenes from the past with a joyous sense of immediacy not accessible in waking life. This is especially true in lucid dreams (dreams in which you realize that you are dreaming.) Recently, I had a lucid dream that I was walking down the familiar streets to my old high school. Everything around me – the dappled sunlight, the brilliant green trees, the shadows on the sidewalk, my very awareness – was sharper and more vivid than in waking life. I was waking up in my dream, and in the dream of life, to all the possibilities and insights I’d missed before. Like writingsunlight treesmemoir, dreams allow you to inhabit the “here and now” of the past.

Here are five tips to help you use your dreams, especially lucid dreams, to deepen and enrich your memoir:

Tip #1: Remember your dreams

Dream memories are fragile and easily disintegrate when you open your eyes. Some people keep a pad and pencil nearby at night to record their dreams. I like to use a mini-tape recorder because turning on the light chases an elusive dream memory further into the shadows. Later, you can transcribe the dream into your journal. What does it bring to mind? What would you like to explore further through writing? Dream recall followed by reflection is a fertile exercise for writing memoir.

Tip #2 Recognize your dream symbols

If you want to experience the euphoria and heightened awareness of a lucid dream, train yourself to recognize objects, people and places that show up repeatedly in your dreams. These are your own unique dream symbols and their appearance could be a sign that you are, in fact, dreaming. For me, houses in my past with new, unexplored rooms, nineteenth century costumes, and old watches signal a possible dream-state.

Tip #3 Test your reality

If I find myself gazing at an antique watch or talking about dreams with a friend, I try to remember to test my state to see if I am dreaming. (Don’t assume you are not dreaming even if you are convinced you’re awake. If you dismiss the possibility during a waking state, you’ll do the same in a dream.) One way to test your state is to jump up in the air and see if you can fly. If it takes you a fraction of second longer to drift down to earth, you are definitely dreaming. (Don’t jump out of any windows though, until you’re absolutely sure.)

Another way to test your reality is to glance at a digital clock, look away, and then glance back. If you’re dreaming, the numbers on the clock will look skewed, wiggle around, or suddenly jump an hour ahead.digital clock

By the way, don’t believe people who insist you’re being silly to test your reality because (they say) you’re obviously not dreaming. Daytime skeptics inevitably show up in your dreams and you’ll be sorry later that you listened to them.

Tip #4 Ask yourself why?

Both in waking and dreaming states, remember to ask yourself, why am I here? What can I discover or investigate?

Do you want to relive a chapter in your life to gain insight? Imaginatively “overhear” a conversation you missed the first time? Talk to someone who is no longer living? These questions will yield treasures both in dreams and writing.

Tip #5 Don’t try too hard

Trying too hard to have a certain dream or to dream lucidly is like trying to fall asleep – the more you try, the more elusive your goal becomes. Just do the exercises faithfully and then forget about it. Your dream work will come to fruition in its own time.

Dreams are an invaluable source of healing, insight and revelation. Use them sparingly in your memoir, however. Other peoples’ dreams are rarely interesting to readers unless they are a deeply compelling, integral part of the story, as in Amy Tan’s essay, A Question of Fate.


Pamela Jane (http://www.pamelajane.com) is the author of over thirty books from board books to memoir. She is also a writing coach, freelance writer, and public speaker. Learn more about her by booking a school visit, perusing her blog, or reading her memoir, An Incredible Talent for Existing: A Writer's Story

Years ago I took a weekend seminar with renowned screenwriting teacher, Bob McKee. The large auditorium was packed. Screenwriters, novelists, children’s authors, and editors of all genres had come to hear McKee talk about the art of writing and storytelling. I could hardly wait for the seminar to start.
fireplace

McKee walked out on stage and stood for a moment, looking out at the audience. Everyone was silent, waiting for him to begin.

“Writing,” he said finally, his intense gaze scanning the audience, “is not about the words.”

Yes! I thought, someone finally said it! I had always felt that words were merely messengers of a deeper truth concealed behind or beneath them.

Writing, McKee went on to say, is about characters, meaning, and emotional impact.

Recently I rediscovered the truth of McKee’s statement when I sat down to write Little Elfie One, a Christmas sequel to my rhyming Halloween book Little Goblins Ten, which had been published the year before. I love writing in rhyme, and although the new manuscript wasn’t due for several months, I couldn’t wait to get started.

was easy to slip into the holiday spirit on a raw November morning as I sat down with pen and paper by the glowing wood stove. This was going to be so much fun! But after several hours of scribbling random rhymes, I started to panic. The story was obviously not working. The idea of a Christmas sequel (which was suggested by a fan of the Halloween book) was a huge mistake! Why had I thought I could pull it off?

My husband maintains that panic is part of my writing process. I always panic, he says, and then I figure out a way to make it work. But if he’s right, I have to really truly panic. I can’t say, “Oh, great, I’m panicking – this is just part of my writing process!” Instead I have to honestly believe that what I’m attempting is impossible. Which is exactly how I felt as I sat staring down at the jumble of disconnected rhymes.

This was not part of my writing process! I really could not do this. My editor had mistakenly placed trust in me, I realized with dismay. There would be no Christmas sequel, no story for the artist to illustrate, no holiday book signings.

Having a book contract in hand is a great feeling ­ – unless you can’t deliver. What was I going to do? The words were tripping me up, tying me (and themselves) in knots, obstructing and protesting at every turn. I could see them marching along carrying signs: “Sentences on Strike!” “Equal Pay for Adverbs,” “No Storyline, No Work.”

Storyline! That’s what was missing. In my eagerness to start writing, I’d forgotten all about the story. My Halloween book had a natural storyline in the building excitement of all the monsters getting ready to go trick-or-treating. But the Christmas story required an entirely different narrative.

At that point I crumpled up everything I’d written so far and threw the whole mess into the fire. Then I started working out a plot.

Bob McKee was right – writing is about characters, story, and meaning. For me, it’s also about panic, and tossing out dismal first drafts that serve as crude roadmaps indicating where not to go. (Literally thousands for my forthcoming memoir.) But the truth is, writing is also about the words, just not initially. Once I tossed out the aimless rhymes and got the story going, the words stopped protesting and hopped on for the ride.

Pamela Jane is the author of over thirty books from board books to memoir. She is also a writing coach, freelance writer, and public speaker. Learn more about her by booking a school visit, perusing her blog, or reading her memoir, An Incredible Talent for Existing: A Writer's Story.