Writing. Life.

It's such a big world and I'm so in love with it.

As I head off to the BlogHer conference, I've been thinking about this blog. And I've come to realize that one of the reasons I sometimes struggle with what to write is that I've strayed so far from what my original purpose was. I've just re-read my first post and found myself both delighted at what I envisioned, and appalled that I let something that so excited me drift away. Below is that first post. I'm sharing it as a declaration of sorts, a promise, to myself and to those who find themselves here.

It’s a strange business, writing a memoir. A writer must stand outside their own life to recreate standing in it. Physical pain cannot be re-experienced, thankfully (or none of us would have siblings.) Misery and grief, however, have thin scabs; you scratch at your own risk. When you almost lose a child, over and over again, and you, the woman who created her and wanted her to know only happiness, can do nothing but watch her choose to kill herself in a slow, ugly way – well, it reduces you. It eliminates things. People, sound, taste, sleep. You feel like a bone licked clean and left to dry in the sun. It was not a place I wanted to return to, not a risk either of us wanted, at first, to take. Even five years later it felt too good to be true, that we survived at all, much less triumphed. I was almost afraid chronicling what happened would somehow tempt fate.

It didn’t.

It was a beautiful way to end a remarkable journey, and begin a new one. Other than some bits about the book tour (I’m assuming going on national TV is, for most of us, an unusual enough experience to find interesting) and about traveling to the eastern bloc this summer to see my sister (the one my mother forgot to tell us about, the baby she hid from the Nazis) my blog won’t be focused on the minutia of my life. You won’t find "100 Things About Me" here. I just wrote 100,000 Things About Me in a memoir. To know anything else about me, you’d need a cat scan.

I’ve spent nearly three years frozen in time, and place – I was indoors almost the entire time. When I did go out, my mind was focused either on how to edit what I’d just written or on what to write tomorrow. I feel like Boo Radley, finally emerging, blinking and stiff. I miss the world! My whole body misses it. I want to smell it, hear it, see it. I’m hungry for crowded cafes, foreign tongues and traffic, for architecture, the smell of oil paint, for bronze made into calves and mannered fingertips, for fields of sunflowers and lavender, for mountain views and farmers markets with piles of tomatoes softening in the sun, for airplane smell, shiny trains and long lines full of people. Beautiful, fussing, impatient people. For a world that leaves me amused, aggravated, sometimes awed, constantly amazed. I’m a writer to the bone, I see the world best through my fingertips. I want you to see it with me.

On Blogs and Blackberries

Until last year, I didn't know what a blog was, much less that I'd be writing one. I don't journal, never had a diary (what journals used to be called, back when all tennis shoes were Keds.) And I've never written short form, though I do know it shares one thing with long form, whether novel, memoir, play or script - the three-act structure. Magazine articles, blog posts, short stories, campfire tales, all have a distinct beginning, middle and end. Our very lives are structured dramatically: we arrive on the scene, create our own Act Two, with its conflicts, crises, victories and defeats, then leave the stage. What is a funeral but a denouement? Human beings are hard-wired for three-act structure.

Which is the topic of a panel I'm heading next week in Chicago at the BlogHer 2007 Conference -

"The Art of Storytelling
There have been many calls for a session about the art of writing itself...how to improve your writing, how to find your unique voice, etc. This session covers narrative prose, and the blog as a platform for narrative prose specifically. In a blogging world of 140 character posts on Twitter and link posts posing as "content", is there a place for stories? Author, blogger and screenwriter Claire Fontaine talks with other bloggers Birdie Jaworski and Ree from Confessions of a Pioneer Woman, about why they still find time to write intriguing beginnings, gripping middles and satisfying ends."

Blogher.org is an amazing resource for women. There are talented, wise, funny women all over the world blogging about everything you could possibly imagine - from culture, politics and media to cooking, travel, humor, health and medicine, knitting, kids and family, therapy, spiritual-themed blogs.

One of my favorite blogs is French-word-a-day.com. An American woman who married a Frenchman after a senior year abroad, now raising two French children, Kristin Espinassse and her family have just bought a ramshackle, 400-year-old farmhouse and vineyard in Provence. Take the time to read her posts over the last several months, they're a joy. She crafted a delightful memoir, from her blog posts, Words in a French Life, Simon&Schuster, 2006.

I also like the wildly popular (over a million visitors a month) simplyrecipes.com, chezpim.com, an award-winning, and gorgeous, cooking blog, jenlemen.com for her wisdom and spirit, literary blog beatrice.com for its smart book reviews and publishing news and Paris-based cookbook author and pastry chef David Lebovitz's often hilarious blog about cooking, chocolate and life in Paris, davidlebovitz.com.

I hope this sends some of you off exploring the blogosphere. I think the only warning I would give is not to read cooking blogs when you're hungry. Torture, albeit a pleasant way to suffer. Chezpim has just sent me off to Costco for those tubs of delicious blackberries (does anything at Costco not come tub-sized?) to fill a marzipan-spread tart shell with. Or maybe I'll spread that tart crust with chocolate first and eat the marzipan right out of the tube.

It Never Goes Away...

While in New York City again recently, I took my daughter, Mia, to the Metropolitan Museum of art to cheer her up. We'd just been there a week before, but she was struggling and few things buoy one's spirit like art.

She'd been working happily at our publisher, ReganBooks, for the last year, when the OJ Simpson debacle and the subsequent closing of Judith Regan's imprint left Mia jobless. She'd moved back to NYC and had been interviewing with other publishers. So were a zillion fresh Ivy League grads willing to work for nothing in a business where jobs open rarely. She was also looking for an apartment. In Manhattan, that means looking, almost daily, at closet-sized rooms costing a hideous amount of money per month, with mostly questionable roommates. She'd been in NYC for three weeks with no luck in either endeavor. Granted, she had temporary places to stay, close college pals and a cousin who's like a sister, but on that day, she was despairing that she'd never make it in the Big Apple and should never have moved back. She had no home, no job and she was going through her savings. I couldn't argue with that, it was all true. And I shouldn't have tried to. All she wanted, really, was to express her frustration without hearing advice or a pep talk.

I reminded her that she'd just written a bestselling book, at the age of 24, had done so well at Regan that she'd been promoted to a publishing position in one year that normally takes two, and had only been looking for work for three weeks. As we were looking at the stunning and surprising Barcelona and Modernity exhibit, I would murmer things like, "Picasso came to Paris with nothing and look what he accomplished."

Not too subtle, mom.

Then we took in the Paul Poiret exhibit. Poiret, along with Coco Chanel, is largely responsible for the way women dress today. I became a Poiret fanatic in my early twenties, when I studied fashion design, and was telling Mia all kinds of things about his life and work. As we left Poiret's fantasy world, she concluded my running commentary with, "You left out the fact that he died penniless and alone."

She hurried outside, sat down on the top step of the Met's grand stairs, put her head on her knees and started to cry. Mia almost never cries and she was so deeply miserable and afraid. I put my arms around her and knew there was absolutely nothing I could say or do. I just petted her hair and sat silently with her.

But as soon as we got back to the hotel lobby, I went to the ladies room and burst into tears. At 24, she's still my baby.