Pam Rosenthal's Blog: Passions and Provocations, Even Now

Note to self: When Janet Mullany casually mentions that she “quite liked” a book, pay attention.

And ps: When she mentions it for the second and then third time, really for no good reason, it’s because she loves it, damn it, and wishes you would get off your ass and read it already, because really, what more does a person want from a friend?

So, yeah, I absolutely shouldn’t have waited (and, to my chagrin and also my delight, waited until she caved and finally sent it to my Kindle). Because The Flatshare is absolutely that good, in ways that make me remember what I love about romance.

Or even that I love romance. For the feeling I get when an author pummels, strokes, or tickles my emotions in just that way and makes me hers* forever. The actual, audible gasp that issues from my lips as the dark moment approaches, followed by my frenzied, speedreading swipes at the screen, because – although I know that Tiffy and Leon will work it out for godssake – at that particular moment I find myself believing that I won’t be able to bear it if they don’t.

Many years ago, I wrote two erotic novels and five romance** novels to try to understand similar twists and turns in my body-mind wiring – the PushMePullYou of lust and fear, wanting and not-so-sure, advance and retreat. And though I still don’t entirely understand how it works, I know it when I feel it, and in these parlous times I’m more grateful for the pleasures than committed to deconstructing them.

Which isn’t to say that I was enchanted by every trope employed in The Flatshare – the precocious dying child, the history of abuse, the elaborately staged accidental naked encounter. But since Leon works in a hospice, the dying child makes sense. The histories of abuse (actually there are two) are dispatched with remarkable speed and lack of sentimentality (in one case in all of twenty words).

And since the book’s premise revolves around a real estate arrangement between two people, neither of whom have enough money, wherein Leon allows Tiffy sole use of his London flat during her off-work hours while he has it during the day (he works nights) – well, of course the naked thing was eventually going to happen. And by that point I’d somehow swallowed the entire premise with all its weird rules (why, again, have they agreed never to meet? And how is it that each of them has spent several decades on this earth not understanding how majorly good-looking they are?) And yet I happily bought these improbabilities and all the rest of it as I barreled on through, sending Janet happy little squeeing texts along the way.

First off because the book is genuinely funny. Quietly, menacingly funny, in sneaky ways I didn’t see coming, and that might leave someone of a different sensibility simply shrugging her shoulders. Like the publishing house – dedicated to crafting, as in “make all your furniture out of ladders, that sort of thing,” which pays Tiffy barely enough to live on – and is called Butterfingers Press? Or, the moment when Tiffy wakes up after an injury and finds Leon looking after her and reading: “Twilight?” she asks. To which he responds, “You went from unconscious to judgmental very quickly there.”

Second because the book’s so full of stuff. Furniture and objets (largely courtesy of Butterfingers, but also in the overflowing contents of Tiffy’s closet, like the purple Doc Martens she’s painted with tall white lilies) but also a web of relationships that amble on at their own pace, often colliding but ultimately finding their contrapuntal resonances when people help and support, recognize and need each other.

Third and finally and mostly because: Leon. A genuinely introverted hero. Caring, nurturing – did I mention great-looking? – but emphatically introverted. Which certainly ought to be a character type I’ve encountered in my romance-reading history, but which isn’t. Because an introverted hero isn’t a broody hero or an I-don’t-want-to-be-my-evil-father hero or an I-never-wanted-to-be-duke-because-why-again hero. It’s something simpler, subtler, realer, and (full disclosure) something I barely understood about my own introverted self and certainly didn’t expect to see so wisely portrayed and explained in a lighter-than-air romantic entertainment.

An introvert is someone for whom social interaction is as exhausting as it is necessary, and who needs the love of someone who understands this about him (or her) and knows how to support the necessity of down time. IRL (or in my real life anyway) that someone may not be as entertainingly colorful, direct, or plugged into a 24/7 friendship network as Tiffy is, but you’re not here to read about my life, but about these lovely, loveable, deserving characters, and how they get what we all want and deserve, in a phrase originated by a thirteen-year-old genius two centuries ago, though her spelling needed to catch up – love and friendship.

And which is why I'm writing this with thanks again and always to Janet.

----

*Also, of course, his, as in Nick Hornby, Armistad Maupin, Steven Saylor.

**Actually one was only a novella, called A House East of Regent Street, recently and lovingly reissued and revised.

In these precarious times, I somehow find myself overwhelmed by memories...

... of how, when I was a little kid, the only Jewish kid in my class in '50s Brooklyn, our school had a Christmas pageant, rehearsing for which, as I remember it, took pretty much all our time for about a month. My facts might be untrustworthy here, but I’d bet that by any reasonable educational standard these rehearsals took up way more time than they should have. While as for diversity -- the only cultural diversity in Bay Ridge that I knew about was between us public school kids and the kids on the block who went to Our Lady of Angels, with their snappy blazers and thrilling tales of punishment at the hands of sadistic nuns.

Meanwhile, back at PS-102, we’d take places, girls on one side, boys on the other, and all in size-places in the auditorium, and sing the carols for hours until we got every bit of them right. Over and over again, tedious beyond measure except for my having to stay alert for the time when I’d have to NOT sing the dangerous words — not that my parents ever told me not to, and yet, I found out years later that I was hardly alone in this. In fact I’m guessing that we were legion, Jewish kids scattered across the five boroughs or maybe the whole English-speaking world, every one of us mindful not to slip up when that “O come let us adore him, _______ the Lord” moment came around again.

A year or so later, thanks to the GI Bill, my family moved to a newly built suburban split level in East Meadow, Long Island, where there were enough Jewish families in the development to insure that our school Christmas pageants were anodyne multicultural affairs (though still lily-white) with due attention paid to dreidel dreidel dreidel. Whereupon the whole awesome, terrifying, Brooklyn pageant — so proudly un-secular and so shamefully disrespectful of the First Amendment — became a strange, hazy, intermittently infuriating but also but oddly compelling memory.

Because the songs, stupid. The carols, the lyrics… We did “Adeste fidelis” in English and Latin, the cognates bouncing around in my bored, busy little brain — “regem angelorum” had to be king of angels, right? And of course “venite adoremus” was “oh come let us adore him.” How beautiful those “orum" and “emus" endings were… how awesome and almost infinite that other song was with its “Glor-ror-uh-ror-i-or-or-uh-ror-i-or-or-uh-ror-i-or-i-uh." And although all my internal translating suggested that I should also blank out the final, stirring “dominum” from “Adeste fidelis,” I happily, guiltily feigned ignorance, hoping I was fooling the Jewish God as I belted it out along with everyone else.

We did the whole story, the cruel innkeeper, the manger, the cold, bright night with that star, and especially the Magi. I wasn’t much for the holy family or the shepherds, but I loved those sad, sad kings out there in the cold, traversing (so much better than traveling) afar in their minor key — the same sad sound that inexplicably, frighteningly, but also beautifully echoed through “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen,” which sounded anything but merry to me, and not like the gentlemen really felt saved from sin or sorrow or anything -- not that I understood what all that saving stuff was about, but still.

The show must have wound down with “Jingle Bells,” but I only dimly remember that part. Just the sadness, the stillness, the awe, the tired kings, the majestic Latin endings to the words I struggle to understand — the precious, precarious sideways education of a cultural outsider.

All of which came back to me yesterday in San Francisco, during a peaceful pandemic Christmas Eve during this strange time out of time, when for the first time in years I remembered another of the lyrics I puzzled over. This one defeated me then, but now it returns in bits and pieces, “a thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices,” and best of all, the possibilities of the idea that “the soul felt its worth.”

It’s gonna be a tough few months. Like the not-so-merry gentleman, we’ll probably be living our lives in a minor key for some time to come. But today, the memories, the ironic internal life of a perpetual outsider — all of it kind of comes together for me. Merry Christmas, or whatever. And may your soul feel its worth, today and in the days to come.

More to come, I hope, but meanwhile (and btw, this is all spoilers):

Murder on Cold Street by Sherry Thomas

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Someday, I'll figure out my take on this series, and why each new book is an event for me, and why I think that what Sherry is doing here is Important and all that theory-groupie stuff. But meanwhile I'm just gonna say that this one worked beautifully for me, and that my inner eleven-year-old is utterly tickled by the progress of several of the relationships, most of all, of course, by Lord Ingram's wise decision that life's too short and perilous not to accede to his love for Charlotte (and if said inner eleven-year-old wants to interrupt here by saying, "Well, it took him long enough," I say, "the kid is right; let her have her say."). His love, and oh yes, his physical attraction, and it's nicely done too, even if offstage. Lots of deft plotting, though people that might best be commented on by people who actually read them for the mystery instead, as I do, for the wondrous possibilities of the concept, of a genius detective, protected by the logical flaws and foibles of social life by her inhuman (need I say somewhat autistic) intellect (but also by her growing understanding of herself as a woman who might -- or might not -- be capable of love).

So much to be worked out here (says the grownup theory groupie). Stay tuned. But meanwhile, a quote (from Charlotte) that explains it so much more beautifully than I can (though if you've read my The Edge of Impropriety, you'll see why this knocked me out). She's speaking to Lord Ingram, of course:

"No," she said after a minute. "You were an education in humanity, not a source of damage."

He blinked -- and laughed. "I was what?"

"I'd always thought that a quintessential aspect of being human -- possibly the most quintessential aspect -- lay in dealing with what one wanted but could not have. For years I believed I would not have that problem, because all I wanted was independence and I saw a clear path to it.

"Then you asked for Lady Ingram's hand and married her. And I became human. Now I, too, wanted something I couldn't have. It was... an instruction in pain. But that was merely the pain of being alive and being human."

Whereupon both my grownup theory-groupie and my inner eleven-year-old tiptoe away hand-in-hand, happy with the mysterious pain of being human and reading something true and beautiful.


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... Partly about reissuing A House East of Regent Street, and partly about second chances in general:

https://tartsweet.com/2020/10/08/gues...

Linking to the guest post I did yesterday at DearAuthor.com (with thanks for letting me have my say)

Because I am really beside myself over the news that it is a real possibility that the Supreme Court may reverse the Obergefell decision. Which directly affects people I love (and maybe people you love as well)

And so I'm cutting and pasting in this old blog post from 2007...

Let’s start this story, as a love story often begins, at a point of crisis.

You’re faced with a life-threatening illness, you sign into the hospital a cancer screening test. Not only are you scared for yourself, but you want every possible protection and support for your partner and your children.

Marital status? the person behind the desk asks.

You don’t bother recounting that 11 years ago you and your partner had a commitment ceremony in front of clergy and 100 friends and family in which you promised to live and love together for the rest of your life. Nor do you mention that you’ve brought two terrific, demanding kids into the world, you’ve worked and saved and bought a house, you’ve lived and loved and supported each other.

But you do say tell her that you’ve gone down to the state building and signed the forms that give you what Connecticut calls a ‘civil union.’

The hospital clerk looks down at the forms in front of her and informs you that ‘civil union’ isn’t one of the choices listed. You’re part of a same-sex couple, and so, she tells you, you’re single.

Next?

As with many romance narratives, let’s provide a little flashback, and let’s let Pam be a moderately omniscient narrator.

We’ll start in 1992, when Robin, my youngest sibling, fell in love with a slim, dark, well-spoken computer consultant — a Yale graduate from a large, close Jewish family very much like the one we grew up in.

But in this romance you already know what the conflict was. Robin fell in love with Barb — and these two women wanted to spend the rest of their lives together.

Not only that, but they wanted to have their commitment to each other recognized by their families, their friends, and their religion. They wanted to celebrate themselves and their love. They wanted to do what people do to formalize a major life transition. They wanted to party.

Word got around. I don’t know what transpired in Barb’s family but my near and dear burned up a lot of phone wires.

Who was going and who just felt it was too weird?

Well of course we love Robin, some voices said, and Barb’s great don’t get me wrong. But do they have to be so — blatant?

OK, some others replied, I’ll go, but I’m not bringing my kids. Well, how could I explain it to them? Might be traumatic.

For a while it looked like it was the Old Testament religious proscriptions that would keep my dad from going. Sadly, my mom resigned herself to going without him.

But Dad did go. Everybody went. Everybody ate and danced and hugged and kvelled. No trauma alerts — the kids were fine and remain so. Barb’s Yalie friends sang some kind of preppy glee club music; a klezmer band played a beloved traditional Yiddish folk song about a parent’s joy, and relief, at having married off a youngest daughter. My dad made a wry, touching little speech — I grabbed onto the person who was next to me at the moment (it was Barb’s mom) and we sobbed for joy in each other’s arms, about how love is stronger than fear or prejudice or habit.

And when a year later, my dad died suddenly, and we came together to bury him, we had the great comfort of remembering that moment, and that speech, and how we’d all been brought closer by expanding our sense of what love was — and of commitment, family, and marriage.

But that was just us, and not the state of Connecticut.

Because it was only a commitment ceremony — with no legal standing whatever. Neither a ceremony nor the undeniable fact of their commitment nor a set of civil union papers makes Robin and Barb married in the eyes of the law. In the eyes of the hospital where Barb went for her cancer screening 11 years later, she was single.

Which is why, for Robin and Barb, for their beautiful children Maya and Joshua, and for everyone who wept and danced that day, and everyone who watched and waited and helped support them through Barb’s successful bout with breast cancer, the story isn’t over.
And which is why, with 7 other same-sex couples, Robin and Barb are part of a lawsuit against the state of Connecticut for the right to marry. And why I’m glad to have a place to tell the story, proud to tell it, and eager to write a happy ending to it.

...

OK (back to 2020), and they won that suit.

And a few years later, they got married for real.

And a few years later, that right for same-sex couples became the law of the land.

And NOW? And SOON?

Now, I just don't know...

Note: I suck at synopsis-writing, but luckily, my husband Michael has a knack for it, as well as an understanding of the how's and why's of this important writers' tool. And he wrote this essay to share his knowledge.

From Pillow Talk to an Editor's Desk: Writing the Compelling Synopsis
by Michael Rosenthal

When Pam first showed me her draft synopsis for The Bookseller's Daughter, my heart sank.

It wasn't that I had any problem with the story, which had been the topic of much of our pillow talk for the past year. On the contrary, I loved every twist and turn of the plot. But I couldn't believe that an agent or editor would want to see the painstakingly sequential account that Pam had rendered, every beloved plot turn stripped of the connective tissue that gave the story meaning and value.

It reminded me of how our son would tell a story when he was very small -- "... and then this happened and then that happened..." - the kind of story that only a delighted mom and dad could find charming.

What lay at the root of Pam's difficulty (and, I suspect, of the difficulty many writers encounter when attempting to produce a synopsis) was a semantic confusion. A synopsis is not the same thing as a plot summary. It is a different kind of creature altogether.

A synopsis (from syn - together and opsis - sight) is a general overview. You might imagine it as an aerial view, in which details are lost or blurred, but the broad contours stand out more clearly. The OED helpfully adds "an outline; a set of paragraphs arranged to exhibit all the parts and divisions in one view."

The emphasis on the visual here has immediate implications with regard to form. A synopsis should not be a continual flow of prose, paragraph after paragraph filling the page. Rather paragraphs should be short, distinct and separated by white space. I believe that three to five sentences is optimal; more than that and it gets baggy, fewer and it reads as breathless.

Each paragraph should have a unified thrust, rather than being an arbitrary slicing-up of the narrative. That is, each should represent a distinct move in the progress of the plot: a significant new state of affairs. Preferably, each paragraph should concern one set of characters, even if that involves reassembling plot moves that are intertwined in the actual book.

It doesn't matter if every move and sub-move in the plot is covered. What matters is that every essential move is made clear and even dramatized. This means that you have to analyze your book, to determine which moves are the essential ones - never a bad idea in any case.

Here is one brief example:

Pam's version:
On the nine-day coach trip, Marie-Laure develops headaches and blurred vision. Arriving in Paris, she's afraid to meet the Marquise, but her fear recedes when she learns of Joseph's arrest. Her headaches and blurred vision are symptoms of toxemia; she's consigned to bed rest for the remainder of her pregnancy. The Marquise and her companion, the actress Mademoiselle Beauvoisin, are very kind. Although at first Marie-Laure is shocked by their relationship, she's won over by their generosity to her, their sisterly regard for Joseph, and their love for each other.
Joseph's legal prospects aren't good. No one will confirm his alibi: no bookseller will admit in court to having received illegal books from him. Marie-Laure suggests the booksellers might still have receipts he signed; du Plessix petitions the court to subpoena these records.
The baby comes early, a healthy girl Marie-Laure names Sophie. When the court refuses to grant Monsieur du Plessix's subpoena, Marie-Laure decides to take matters into her own hands. Telling the Marquise and Mademoiselle Beauvoisin she needs to visit her brother, she takes Sophie back to her home city in the south, planning to sneak into a bookseller's office and steal the receipt with Joseph's signature on it.

My Version:
On the way to Paris, Marie-Laure falls ill of complications of pregnancy. On her arrival she's greeted by the Marquise and (surprisingly) Mademoiselle Beauvoisin. For (as at the chateau) Joseph has been performing a charade, providing cover for the liaison between the actress and the Marquise. Shocked at first, Marie-Laure is won over by the two women's intelligence, devotion, and sisterly regard for Joseph. She gives birth under their care.
But Joseph isn't there to welcome her or celebrate his daughter's arrival. He's in the Bastille, framed for the murder of a particularly loathsome nobleman, whom he was known to detest. His alibi is his book smuggling, but of course none of the booksellers will admit to trading in forbidden literature. In order to prove where Joseph was during the murder, Marie-Laure journeys to Montpellier, resolving to steal the relevant receipts from Alain's files.

You will notice that, while I cut quite a bit, I also added something: the idea of Joseph enacting a charade with Marquise and Mlle. Beauvoisin. I did this not merely to dramatize the paragraph, but also to recall an earlier charade that Joseph enacted with Marie-Laure in the first half of the book (and the first page of the synopsis). I was thereby able to emphasize a key motif threading through the book, the idea of charade.

Remember that your synopsis is a promotional exercise. No matter how well clearly you present your book's story, the synopsis falls short if it fails to make clear what makes your book unique and worthy of attention.
In the case of The Bookseller's Daughter, that was easy. The book's unique feature, conveyed even in its title, is the emphasis on reading, the fact that the courtship of the hero and heroine is played out through their mutual love of books. Since most readers, and certainly most editors, are booklovers, I highlighted this feature in the earliest paragraphs of the synopsis. Another attraction of the book was the way it played with the idea of playacting. This particularly informs the erotic sections, whose unique sizzle derives from the fetish of charades. Hence, the re-emphasis of the charade motif.

A final point about synopses emerges from this discussion and from our experience. To do a synopsis in the manner I have been suggesting is also to force yourself to analyze the narrative structure and consistency of your own work. If, despite your best efforts, the synopsis refuses to come into focus, perhaps it's time for another draft of your book, rather than another draft of your synopsis.

Colson Whitehead’s THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD. First posted at Goodreads:

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Up there with WOLF HALL as a spectacular historical novel (one of the best I’ve read), but so so different. Because not only are the characters fictional, but the armature it’s built on — the notion that there was actually a physical railroad running under the ground, conveying brave fugitive slaves to different areas of the United States — is obviously counterfactual.

And yet it’s also clearly and eloquently steeped in the too little acknowledged fact of centuries of United States slavery. For example, the terse occasional section headings (taken from university archives) are actual advertisements placed by the owners of runaway slaves, like::

30 DOLLARS REWARD

will be given to any person who will deliver to me, or confine in any gaol in the state so that I get her again, a likely yellow NEGRO GIRL 18 years of age who ran away nine months past. She is an artfully lively girl, and will no doubt, attempt to pass as a free person, has a noticeable scar on her elbow, occasioned by a burn. I have been informed she is lurking in and about Edenton.

BENJ. P. WELLS

Murfreesboro, Jan. 5, 1812

Each is as chilling as only historical actuality can be: plainspoken testament to casual daily inhumanity as inured to its own degradation of spirit as it is deaf and blind to the unfathomable bravery of its victim; raw material for Whitehead’s brilliant fantastical picaresque through a few of this nation’s institutions of oppression and racism; more than a century of history and geography telescoped, origami’ed into one woman’s adventure away from bondage and the shame of bondage.

And yet, as I write this — as I urge you to read it NOW — run, don’t walk — I fear that I’m misrepresenting this stunning novel by making it sound like it’s good for you, a moral lesson. When in fact it reads quickly, fluidly: My notebook is studded with passages I copied out in order to try to pin it down, to better marvel at the clear, sure, compassionate sentences, the ongoing mysteries of people and objects, perception and understanding.

A notion creeps over the heroine “like a shadow.” She smiles, another slave observes, “with brevity and sufficiency.” Caesar, the slave who sees her, “had never spoken to her but had figured this out about her. It was sensible. She knew the preciousness of what she called her own. Her joys, her plot, that block of sugar maple she perched on like a vulture.” I lingered over the word “sensible” for quite a while: sensible as in perceptible to the senses. There’s an imminence, a tremulous to this parodic universe where people are used as things and the tears of things shimmer in the air. “It was the most splendid locomotive yet, its shiny red paint paint returning the light even through the shroud of soot.” “She’d never been the first person to open a book.” “Poetry and prayer put ideas in people’s heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world.”

Fully a wonderful novel, enriching and necessary in a painful season.

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The historian Robert Darnton said that somewhere once, in homage to Claude Lévi-Strauss, who said that food was good to think with. Anyway, it’s what I’ve always thought, it’s sort of the mainspring of all my erotic and romance writing, and it’s rather taken a beating in the current post FSoG climate.

So I’m grateful once again to my smart new online friend, erotic writer and thinker LN Bey, for nudging my thoughts in that direction — hell, for nudging me to think at all, and for posting links to other interesting discussions of this dismal post-FSoG world we didn’t make (or did we). Thanks again, LN Bey, for your energy, intelligence, even optimism. Hoping I can send some readers your way, in particular to your lively discussion of Venus in Furs at http://lnbey.com/the-m-in-bdsm-venus-in-furs/

When you have an idea for a book — really have an idea — it’s more like the idea has you. Which was what happened to me when I thought I might like to tell a BDSM story in the voice of a smart, wisecracking, highly literate San Francisco bike messenger. Carrie isn’t real, of course (though the occasional reader swears she’s met her). But her voice in my head had all the energy of a lifetime of idle fantasy and guilty reading, and all I had to do was listen and get it all down.

Which is why I’m constantly surprised to learn what I was doing, long after that happy period drew to an end and I’d pretty much exhausted my kinky imagination. Surprised and delighted, I should add, when another of Carrie’s amazingly smart and astute readers points out this or that aspect of the book. As in this dazzlingly, deliciously thoughtful piece by a new erotic writer, L.N. Bey. If you’ve read my Carrie books (or for that matter, anything I’ve ever written), you know that to me there’s nothing sexier or more important than being understood. Thank you, L.N. Bey.

Read the essay here. And enjoy.