George Hodgman's Blog

A lot of my favorite urban spaces are the ones that feel secret, an unexpected world behind a wall, a door, or a gate in the middle of a contrasting urban atmosphere. So it was a special treat to read at artist/architect Frank Schlagger's studio/residence near the Hill in St. Louis. The place began life as movie theater, but it has had lots of lives. I met some fabulous, smart, hip people--really good readers and potential friends for the future. Lana Pepper, my new buddy, is the Empress of the Arts in St. Louis and has been so kind and supportive. She put together an evening for the St. Louis University Library Associates that became more and more beautiful as the sun set and the lights went on around the pool. Thank you all, lovely people. Also, Lana took me on a tour of her own loft Saturday--one of my favorite living spaces ever and then showed me parts of the city that I didn't know. XO LP, Frank and all your wonderful friends.

My father was a really good singer. I remember once, as a little boy, waking up late at night. My parents had given a party that night. My mother was asleep and my father was happily cleaning up, singing to himself. He and his mother both loved Nat King Cole. He was singing "Rambling Rose," I can still hear it. "Rambling Rose, rambling rose, why you ramble, no one knows." I got up and ate the rest of the Fritos and French Onion dip and watched him polish the cocktail glasses until they shined. Here are some of his favorite songs.

Highway 79, between Hannibal and Louisiana, a stunning stretch of scenery.

Headed to Iowa, a state I have visited only once (in high school) in our old car. I am not great with maps. Please don't let me wind up in North Dakota. Tonight I am reading at Prairie Lights Books.

The thunder roars and suddenly the dog is up on my lap. It is a new and wonderful thing to me to be safety for a living creature. Do I sound like Peggy Noonan?

George: "Please. Let's be quiet for a while. Here's the new Vanity Fair."

Betty: "Look at her bosom."

George: "She used to to be man."

Betty: "Where did he get a bosom like that?"

George: "They did a surgery."

Betty: "That must have been quite an event."

I guess some people get awards and stuff, but if you ask me, nothing says loving like carving the face of a writer on the side of a cocoanut. I feel I have found my place at long last and will treasure these mementos--Betty and me--for as long as I waddle through the green grass of this crazy, lovely world. Thanks for sending, Mary Jane O'Brien and here's to the wonderful artist who felt enough to pick up her paint brush and use her wonderful imagination. I look so much thinner than in photos and will heretofore agree to be reproduced only on nuts and fruits. I LOVE THESE. XO

Dear friends:

On Thursday night, June 18 at 7 pm, I am going to be speaking at the legendary Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa City. If you live in the area and are inclined, please drop in. I'd love to meet you. If you have Iowa pals, do forward this to them if you can. Thank you.

Not a night for sleep in this house until just now, at 5:14 or so with the birds beginning to chatter and the sky lightening, my mother ceased saying the same two words--that name she cannot let go of-- over and over and over and finally drifted off. No wait, no. Oh no, no no. The silence is over. Do I give her another pill, a half or a quarter? The quiet is broken and it was just a few minutes. No peace for Betty: she is starting to speak again, so determined to remember, for whatever reason, that she cannot close her eyes or stop saying the name of this woman she barely knew so many years ago but has recently re-encountered. For only a few minutes. Two months ago. They said perhaps ten words. They were never friends, barely acquaintances. My father helped the woman remodel her house more than forty years ago; he said she was a pain. It took her days to choose a shade of paint for her little bare house way far out in the country. Of course it wound up white, but she had wanted to consider every color, as if she were planning to embark on a more flamboyant era in a house more daring, in her old worn shoes. My father said she told him it was a treat to get to come to down on her own. She had so many children. And here she is, in our house now, in the hallways of my mother's head, demanding to be recalled. Hour after hour my mother has said this name, the name of this woman, someone who was no one that Betty ever, ever thought about or mentioned when our lives were normal. Day after day now. Week after week. Sometimes she seems to be calling her. Sometimes she exclaims the name as if this woman has just walked into the room. Sometimes she says it as if she is just furious at this woman who, God help her, is miles away sleeping or thinking about maybe getting up to collect the eggs from the chickens or go to the toilet, not knowing she is the object of this obsessive litany, just waking up, unsuspecting that in town, on a pretty green street, another woman's mind has made her so desperately important. My mother almost chants this name as if it were the key to everything, as if this woman had told her some great truth or secret or reminded her of something I will never know. Do I give her another pill, a half or a quarter? It wouldn't help. Nothing stops this disease when it is running full strength. This is where we are. The absolutely unbreakable power of the will to remember, to ask and ask and ask is finally astonishing. This will cannot give up or rest an instant. It is relentless and unmerciful. It drives her and drains all of these rest of her. Why this name so often sought? That is part of the mystery, but there is no logic. Why this name repeated and repeated hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times, thousands by now, for more than two months as if that big old farm woman who sat down by her in a church basement just to rest her feet for ten minutes was the most important personage my mother remembers from all her decades on the Earth. Just a funny, sweet old farm woman with swollen ankles overflowing her old black shoes and a plain dress owned forever. She has invaded my mother's head, this house, this odd, never-ending summer night when no one snores but the dog. It is the strangest thing. I will never, ever forget this woman now. She has became a friend and going in to get breakfast I feel like I should get a third plate down from the cabinet.

For several months now, I have been waiting for the review of Bettyville from the New York Times Book Review. Here it is. This is a nice moment and I am definitely opening up a box of Little Debbies. Thanks.

"Big-time magazine editor leaves New York City to care for his ailing yet feisty mother in their old-timey Midwestern hometown. The premise sounds like fodder for a laugh-track sitcom. Hodgman���s gorgeously constructed memoir, however, couldn���t be further from a pat Hollywood confection.
In ���Bettyville,��� Hodgman vividly depicts Paris, Mo., pop. 1,246, a small town easing into obsolescence. Against this backdrop, he creates an unforgettable portrait of his mother, Betty���a strong-willed nonagenarian struggling against the slow-motion breakdown of her mind and body. Hodgman evokes her with wit and tenderness, gently mocking her tendency to eat ���enough for a camp of lumberjacks in the Maine woods��� or her certainty that she ���has not had what she considers a successful hair appointment since around 1945.��� Even as they drive each other crazy, their mutual affection is ever-present: ������You���re my buddy,��� I tell her. ���Am I?��� she asks. ���You know I wouldn���t want just another damn sweet old lady,��� I say.���
A bundle of contradictions, Betty is both curmudgeonly and compassionate; an irreverent straight-talker who, along with her husband, Big George, can���t bring herself to acknowledge���much less accept���her son���s sexuality. With bracing honesty, Hodgman eloquently chronicles the devastating psychic toll of this silence: He struggles to open up to his romantic partners, and later falls into substance abuse. ���Where do the hidden things go? Not away. Nothing goes away,��� Hodgman writes. ���Shame is inventive,��� he recalls reading in a book. ���Shame can make a joke. It can reach for a bottle. It can trip you up when you don't even know it is there.���
Despite his travails, Hodgman writes without an ounce of self-pity or desire for retribution. ���I can never be a person who has not made mistakes,��� he says. ���But I can be someone honest who has lived through them: one of those who look you square in the eye and say, ���This is how it has been, and it is O.K.������