Recently came across the "Dimitri the Stud" message supposedly left on a woman's work voicemail. The "elegant" lady in question caught Dimitri's attention after a chance two-minute public meeting. Whether real or fake, this is one of the funniest audios I've listened to in a long time. Supposedly the "real" Dmitri is actually from Toronto and runs a website called Dmitri the Lover. There, for a price, he offers men advice on how to improve their game in the dating scene.
Andy Oliver and I had a chuckle about the advice giving business. "That's awesome. So he's an expert....yet "very single"... Reminds me of our field. Lots of advice from people who are not actually good at whatever it is they are doing :-)"
Monday, January 26, 2009
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Tina Fey Golden Globes Speech
Just another reason why Tina rocks.
I'd like to see a "True Confessions of a Hater" blog entry someday, myself. More specifically, I'd like to know what is so satisfying about nurturing an online hate obsession with somebody you've never met, or a product you wouldn't condescend to use.
Tina's right--message board anonymity is undoubtedly a factor. She's also right when she says the the moment you register to a comment board to respond, you've become even crazier than they are. Then there's the simple fact that, on the Internet, extreme voices get heard. I once read about something called the Howard Dean phenomenon. This was not a theory about Dean's popularity, but a theory on how Dean's popularity got overestimated. The theory is that the more extreme voices get all the Google mojo, whereas the majority audience falls into the more moderate and silent, "lurker" category.
Why do people get targeted? With "relative" degrees of finesse, the hater would respond "because you are an jerk and your product suckz." On a more thoughtful level, an Australian (who would one day happily betray us, himself) once told me about something called the "Tall Poppy Syndrome." The Tall Poppy Syndrome says that the desire to whack down to size any person or entity that tries to stand out from the crowd is human nature, as is the tendency to criticize them as being presumptuous, attention seeking, or without merit.
We had our fair share of these people in the JBoss days. The successful hater develops a respected position in the online community, coming to be viewed as a stand-up guy. He gets credibility for having no stake in the subject of his rants. He excels at strategies like writing about 10 flaws in your product. Of these 10 flaws, only one will have any real merit. Try in vain to point out that 9/10ths of Joe Hater's argument is patently false, he and his posse will hone in on the one weakness he has identified, with the rationale that if they were right about that, they must be right about everything else. Ignore the hater or engage him, it's a lose-lose proposition. Ignore him and he and his posse will declare victory: your failure to respond must mean that you are tacitly admitting everything he says is right. Engage him and he starts sharpening his teeth: ah ha, if you bother to respond this must because you are on the defensive.
...I want you to really know how lucky I am to have the year I've had this year and, if you ever start to feel too good about yourself, they have this thing called the Internet! You can find a lot of people there who don't like you! I'd like to address some of them now! BabsonLacrosse, you can suck it. DianeFan, you can suck it. Cougar Letter, you can really suck it 'cause you've been after me all year...
I'd like to see a "True Confessions of a Hater" blog entry someday, myself. More specifically, I'd like to know what is so satisfying about nurturing an online hate obsession with somebody you've never met, or a product you wouldn't condescend to use.
Tina's right--message board anonymity is undoubtedly a factor. She's also right when she says the the moment you register to a comment board to respond, you've become even crazier than they are. Then there's the simple fact that, on the Internet, extreme voices get heard. I once read about something called the Howard Dean phenomenon. This was not a theory about Dean's popularity, but a theory on how Dean's popularity got overestimated. The theory is that the more extreme voices get all the Google mojo, whereas the majority audience falls into the more moderate and silent, "lurker" category.
Why do people get targeted? With "relative" degrees of finesse, the hater would respond "because you are an jerk and your product suckz." On a more thoughtful level, an Australian (who would one day happily betray us, himself) once told me about something called the "Tall Poppy Syndrome." The Tall Poppy Syndrome says that the desire to whack down to size any person or entity that tries to stand out from the crowd is human nature, as is the tendency to criticize them as being presumptuous, attention seeking, or without merit.
We had our fair share of these people in the JBoss days. The successful hater develops a respected position in the online community, coming to be viewed as a stand-up guy. He gets credibility for having no stake in the subject of his rants. He excels at strategies like writing about 10 flaws in your product. Of these 10 flaws, only one will have any real merit. Try in vain to point out that 9/10ths of Joe Hater's argument is patently false, he and his posse will hone in on the one weakness he has identified, with the rationale that if they were right about that, they must be right about everything else. Ignore the hater or engage him, it's a lose-lose proposition. Ignore him and he and his posse will declare victory: your failure to respond must mean that you are tacitly admitting everything he says is right. Engage him and he starts sharpening his teeth: ah ha, if you bother to respond this must because you are on the defensive.
Monday, January 19, 2009
I turn 37 and...
...get my own blog!
Thanks to Marc and Andy Oliver for hosting my previous blogs, and for helping get this one set up. My previous LinuxIntegrators posts to come. I will continue to cross-post on Maison Fleury, as well.
A new year, new address, new friends, re-acquaintance with old friends, and more progress on my play.
Thank you to everybody who sent me birthday wishes.
Un abrazo,
Nathalie
Viewing Habits: "House"
Recently, Marc and I have been watching television series by dvd, or, when we catch up: iTunes, years after the original seasons come out. Given our limited time (evenings when the kids are in bed), we would rather sacrifice hipness for enough feedback on the show to justify the commitment. We used to watch more movies. The problem is it requires a lot of research to not completely waste your time there, given the high proportion of duds and formula flicks churned out every year.
A good television series, on the other hand, is a known quantity. Once you wind up investing the time getting to know the characters and getting caught up in the story arc, you'll even put up with the filler episodes, hoping for the eventual plot development crumb. It's sort of like catching up with an old friend. You may not always have much to say to each other, but there's a reassuring comfort in your shared experience.
House
You've got to love a series based on a misanthropic diagnostician, who believes everybody is a liar. When some guest character meets House for the first time, the character remarks: "You must be really good at what you do, because, with your winning personality, nobody would tolerate you ten seconds, if you weren't." If American society weren't so anesthetized with political correctness, it might not be such a vicarious thrill to dwell on a character who hasn't been conditioned not to say what he thinks.
Great character development aside, what really made the series work was tightly-written episode-specific narrative--any random episode could be enjoyed out of the series and season context...plus the overall story arc was compelling enough to keep you coming back. Unfortunately, that all changed after Season 3, when House fired his whole team. The original team of Cameron, Chase and Foreman had relative depth; there was tension and chemistry among those three and House.
I simply didn't buy into the contest/Survivor twist that House uses to get the new team in Season 4. Kutner, Taub and "Thirteen" are very loosely written, pastiches almost. There is little tension among these three and House, and their interaction tends to be sitcom predictable. Meanwhile, the steam has gone out of House's long-time friendship with Wilson. After everything House has done to Wilson, it simply is not believable that these two are still friends. It would appear the writers feel this too--this relationship has also become sit-commy and is limping along.
As far as I'm concerned, I'm basically holding on to see if House and Cuddy will get together. Now romantic tension is the bread and butter of these long-running series, especially with the female element like me, that is routing for them to finally act on their latent attraction and hop in the sack (and then get married and have lots of babies:) I'm also aware of David Mamet (the the first person I read who verbalized this in "Bambi vs. Godzilla")'s rule for love stories: the plot tension does not come from what brings these two people together (presumably they are relatively young and attractive), but what keeps them apart. However, in House and Cuddy's case, enough is enough. There's a certain amount of House sabotaging this relationship that I'm willing to tolerate and attribute to the Imp of the Perverse or some cowardly instinct where a known misery is better than grasping at happiness and losing and it. Nevertheless, this has become such a staple of the more recent seasons of the show that it's starting to become a mechanical, tired old tease.
As for the episodic mini medical plots a la Sherlock Holmes (thus the much commented on House/Wilson, Holmes/Watson parallel), I was always afraid to ask any doctor acquaintances what they felt about the show for fear of having an expert dismiss my fun little rendez-vous with "House" as a vulgar distraction for the ignorant masses. However, from the point of view of somebody with no medical background, I wonder if they aren't running out of good story lines. The episode opens so often with the same Scooby Doo set-up--it's not the character you think who will fall deathly ill--that it's become a cliche. Also, I'm finding my self less able to follow (theoretically) the diagnostic path leading to the discovery of the true medical culprit, not to mention the patient soap operas seem less interesting, as of lately.
On the other hand, one consequence of the show, due to the rare nature of some of these diseases (in non-tropical, first world countries), is the acquisition of some rare phobias about un-pasteurized cheeses, lurking tape-worms and stagnant water in fountains. I carry an epi-pen in case of asthmatic reaction, which, in my case, has only happened in a doctor's office as a consequence of allergy shots. However, I'm jut waiting for the right case of life-threatening anaphylaxis to wield it heroically.
A good television series, on the other hand, is a known quantity. Once you wind up investing the time getting to know the characters and getting caught up in the story arc, you'll even put up with the filler episodes, hoping for the eventual plot development crumb. It's sort of like catching up with an old friend. You may not always have much to say to each other, but there's a reassuring comfort in your shared experience.
House
You've got to love a series based on a misanthropic diagnostician, who believes everybody is a liar. When some guest character meets House for the first time, the character remarks: "You must be really good at what you do, because, with your winning personality, nobody would tolerate you ten seconds, if you weren't." If American society weren't so anesthetized with political correctness, it might not be such a vicarious thrill to dwell on a character who hasn't been conditioned not to say what he thinks.
Great character development aside, what really made the series work was tightly-written episode-specific narrative--any random episode could be enjoyed out of the series and season context...plus the overall story arc was compelling enough to keep you coming back. Unfortunately, that all changed after Season 3, when House fired his whole team. The original team of Cameron, Chase and Foreman had relative depth; there was tension and chemistry among those three and House.
I simply didn't buy into the contest/Survivor twist that House uses to get the new team in Season 4. Kutner, Taub and "Thirteen" are very loosely written, pastiches almost. There is little tension among these three and House, and their interaction tends to be sitcom predictable. Meanwhile, the steam has gone out of House's long-time friendship with Wilson. After everything House has done to Wilson, it simply is not believable that these two are still friends. It would appear the writers feel this too--this relationship has also become sit-commy and is limping along.
As far as I'm concerned, I'm basically holding on to see if House and Cuddy will get together. Now romantic tension is the bread and butter of these long-running series, especially with the female element like me, that is routing for them to finally act on their latent attraction and hop in the sack (and then get married and have lots of babies:) I'm also aware of David Mamet (the the first person I read who verbalized this in "Bambi vs. Godzilla")'s rule for love stories: the plot tension does not come from what brings these two people together (presumably they are relatively young and attractive), but what keeps them apart. However, in House and Cuddy's case, enough is enough. There's a certain amount of House sabotaging this relationship that I'm willing to tolerate and attribute to the Imp of the Perverse or some cowardly instinct where a known misery is better than grasping at happiness and losing and it. Nevertheless, this has become such a staple of the more recent seasons of the show that it's starting to become a mechanical, tired old tease.
As for the episodic mini medical plots a la Sherlock Holmes (thus the much commented on House/Wilson, Holmes/Watson parallel), I was always afraid to ask any doctor acquaintances what they felt about the show for fear of having an expert dismiss my fun little rendez-vous with "House" as a vulgar distraction for the ignorant masses. However, from the point of view of somebody with no medical background, I wonder if they aren't running out of good story lines. The episode opens so often with the same Scooby Doo set-up--it's not the character you think who will fall deathly ill--that it's become a cliche. Also, I'm finding my self less able to follow (theoretically) the diagnostic path leading to the discovery of the true medical culprit, not to mention the patient soap operas seem less interesting, as of lately.
On the other hand, one consequence of the show, due to the rare nature of some of these diseases (in non-tropical, first world countries), is the acquisition of some rare phobias about un-pasteurized cheeses, lurking tape-worms and stagnant water in fountains. I carry an epi-pen in case of asthmatic reaction, which, in my case, has only happened in a doctor's office as a consequence of allergy shots. However, I'm jut waiting for the right case of life-threatening anaphylaxis to wield it heroically.
Friday, January 16, 2009
JBoss: Behind the Headlines?
For those of you who suggested I write a "JBoss: Behind the Headlines" novel, thanks for the vote of confidence. There are a lot of great stories there. However, relying solely on our little company to paint a picture of the software environment and entrepreneurial experience in the late 90s, pre-recessionary 2000s is over-reaching. A novel that captured an era would involve getting a lot of other people to tell me their stories, other companies, other exits, the VC perspective, the IPO experience (which is dead for now), the bankers, the customers, the corporate competitors... research and interviews I don't have the energy to do.
I could, however, be tempted to draw on my JBoss experiences to write a blog entry-format satire of the corporate IT and entrepreneurial world my former colleagues and I came from. Think something along the lines of Lucy Kellaway's Martin Lukes saga in the FT. My time and writing constraints favor an episodic story flow, with the ability to go forward and backward in time and introduce a varied cast of characters, a la the television series "Lost." I see this as being a story in the picaresque genre.
From Wikipedia:
Being a lazy academic and person whose professional experience grew out of the collaborative environment of open source (get other people to do your work for you for free!), I welcome story ideas and collaborative suggestions from my readers, by comments or email (nathaliemfATgmailDOTCOM). Let me know which themes and characters you want to hear about.
I could, however, be tempted to draw on my JBoss experiences to write a blog entry-format satire of the corporate IT and entrepreneurial world my former colleagues and I came from. Think something along the lines of Lucy Kellaway's Martin Lukes saga in the FT. My time and writing constraints favor an episodic story flow, with the ability to go forward and backward in time and introduce a varied cast of characters, a la the television series "Lost." I see this as being a story in the picaresque genre.
From Wikipedia:
The picaresque novel (Spanish: "picaresca", from "pícaro", for "rogue" or "rascal") is a popular subgenre of prose fiction which is usually satirical and depicts in realistic and often humorous detail the adventures of a roguish hero of low social class who lives by his or her wits in a corrupt society.
Being a lazy academic and person whose professional experience grew out of the collaborative environment of open source (get other people to do your work for you for free!), I welcome story ideas and collaborative suggestions from my readers, by comments or email (nathaliemfATgmailDOTCOM). Let me know which themes and characters you want to hear about.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
The Open Source Developer's Wife
When I was active in public relations for our software company, JBoss, I sometimes found myself in the awkward position of being mistaken for an engineer. Trying to engage in an elaborate discussion of how X works with me is pretty much equivalent to doing a strip-tease for a blind person. I don't care so much how X works; I'm more interested in what X can do for me. I'm not an engineer, I'm just married to one.
My 37th birthday is coming up and what I'd like most is for my husband to set up a separate blog for me on Blogger, archiving my posts on "Maison-Fleury" (I'll continue to cross-post on this blog), and my previous blog, "Objective Correlative, Confessions of a Wayward Academic and Would-be Propagandist," from Andy Oliver's Linux Integrators.
For his recent 40th birthday, Marc, dear old fashioned gentleman that he is, suggested I get a pair of DD, stripper-grade knockers. I declined. Ironically, it is going to be a lot harder for me to get blog help, than any sort of outrageous thing I could ask him to buy. He hates and resents being used as tech support, by the family. This results in the following sort of scenario: the children are threatening to spontaneously combust because their Disney movie won't play.
"Darling, could you please fix the DVD?"
"What are you going to do for me?"
"What I'm going to do for you is get your children to stop screaming."
Early in our marriage, I got an inkling of things to come. We lived in a studio apartment in Paris and were finishing our graduate degrees. We somehow had enough money to buy a Compaq computer. Soon, to my horror, my husband had gone off to the FNAC and bought himself some sort of dubious looking Linux distribution from a company named Keops or Cyclops. The guts of the computer were splayed across the carpet because he had decided to partition it, and all I could think was that he had completely invalidated our warranty and how in the hell was I going to write my master's thesis if that thing didn't work.
At the height of the tech boom and before JBoss, we lived in Silicon Valley. We had ordinary corporate jobs, and then Marc had an unsuccessful first company. Rent was high and there was a moment when our landlord sold our apartment. We had a fifty-pound bull terrier and our previous nothing special 1 1/2 bedroom apartment in Foster City, which I felt was ridiculously over-priced at $1700 was now going for something like $2200 a month and they wouldn't accept pets anymore. I wondered where we had gone wrong because it was impossible to find a place to rent and even more impossible to find a place that would take a 50 pound dog, and a place that will force you to give up your dog is a place that will suck the soul out of you. I was grateful to move to Atlanta. Silicon Valley felt like an industry town. It was rare to run into anybody who didn't work in software and everybody was comparing themselves and seeing how you measured up (which we didn't).
When we founded JBoss, we were young. We literally had nothing to lose. Marc complained a lot about work. At the time, it didn't seem like such a big risk to leave a corporate job. Anybody in the industry with reasonable skills (or without) could find an equivalent un-fulfilling job several months later, if things didn't pan out. I figured that nine months was reasonable to see if we could cover our expenses, expenses which became a lot lighter when we moved in with my parents.
In the early days I took care of the legal documents, accounting, setting up trainings, our economic life-blood for the first year or so, and basically dabbled in everything else that did not involve engineering. When we moved to Atlanta, our daughter was two. Initially I was going to look for part-time work and help Marc out with JBoss just until "things got off the ground." It quickly became apparent that no other job would provide me the flexibility, fun and pay-off we were seeing in JBoss.
Sales is one thing I've never been good at or enjoyed. We were fortunate enough to have our customers come to us and tell us what they wanted, but it soon became apparent we were leaving a lot of opportunities on the table, for lack of resources. it was a relief when we could hire Ben Sabrin. Having a full-time salesperson really paid off for us. The increased revenues also meant that I could concentrate more on public relations, which I headed until we sold JBoss to Red Hat. Before we had a marketing budget, we had a PR agency and a significant (for us) monthly PR retainer. However, PR, especially in a field like middleware, doesn't work in a vacuum. You have to have a product, customers and a story.
People used to ask us if were cash-flow positive. We couldn't have afforded to be anything else, having lost what savings we had in a previous unsuccessful company. With JBoss, we kept overhead under control, working mostly with consultants until our VC investment made it possible to hire more employees.
What is it like to work with your spouse? Maybe what made it work for us is that we've always worked in different fields, which minimizes the opportunities for friction. The downside of working with your spouse, when you're passionate about what you do, is that the borders between your personal and work life are very thin. We had to make an effort not to talk about work all the time. One day, I read a BusinessWeek article about my husband and JBoss that began with this "La-dee-dah, let's take a look at the demented Fleury family where their six year old daughter talks about whether or not IBM is after them on a Sunday morning" intro. I had gotten used to a certain amount of negative personal attacks in the online media, but it was very painful to have my children brought up in that context.
Selling the company was very hard. I don't think people can appreciate that unless they've done it. The attitude can be--just take your big ass divorce settlement and move on. However, when you're a creative person, it's difficult to give up control. You feel like you've sold your child upriver. JBoss had a very distinctive personality. We spent five years of our life building that company and were very close to so many of the people with whom we worked. We'd lived through a real roller coaster ride together. The difference between something and nothing can turn on a dime. You have a window of opportunity and you need to seize it. You need to make sure that all the struggles weren't for nothing and that you reward the people who've been loyal to you.
Back when we were struggling, I would occasionally run into or read about the Dot Com success stories. I remember thinking how these people were so full of themselves, so convinced that they had worked harder and were smarter than everybody else. The truth is that anybody with an ounce of perspective knows people who are smarter and have worked harder than themselves, people that didn't make it because the timing wasn't right or because of circumstances beyond their control.
We've been very lucky. In this New Year, I look back and am truly grateful for the opportunity we had, for the people we got to know and work with, and for the fun times we had together.
My 37th birthday is coming up and what I'd like most is for my husband to set up a separate blog for me on Blogger, archiving my posts on "Maison-Fleury" (I'll continue to cross-post on this blog), and my previous blog, "Objective Correlative, Confessions of a Wayward Academic and Would-be Propagandist," from Andy Oliver's Linux Integrators.
For his recent 40th birthday, Marc, dear old fashioned gentleman that he is, suggested I get a pair of DD, stripper-grade knockers. I declined. Ironically, it is going to be a lot harder for me to get blog help, than any sort of outrageous thing I could ask him to buy. He hates and resents being used as tech support, by the family. This results in the following sort of scenario: the children are threatening to spontaneously combust because their Disney movie won't play.
"Darling, could you please fix the DVD?"
"What are you going to do for me?"
"What I'm going to do for you is get your children to stop screaming."
Early in our marriage, I got an inkling of things to come. We lived in a studio apartment in Paris and were finishing our graduate degrees. We somehow had enough money to buy a Compaq computer. Soon, to my horror, my husband had gone off to the FNAC and bought himself some sort of dubious looking Linux distribution from a company named Keops or Cyclops. The guts of the computer were splayed across the carpet because he had decided to partition it, and all I could think was that he had completely invalidated our warranty and how in the hell was I going to write my master's thesis if that thing didn't work.
At the height of the tech boom and before JBoss, we lived in Silicon Valley. We had ordinary corporate jobs, and then Marc had an unsuccessful first company. Rent was high and there was a moment when our landlord sold our apartment. We had a fifty-pound bull terrier and our previous nothing special 1 1/2 bedroom apartment in Foster City, which I felt was ridiculously over-priced at $1700 was now going for something like $2200 a month and they wouldn't accept pets anymore. I wondered where we had gone wrong because it was impossible to find a place to rent and even more impossible to find a place that would take a 50 pound dog, and a place that will force you to give up your dog is a place that will suck the soul out of you. I was grateful to move to Atlanta. Silicon Valley felt like an industry town. It was rare to run into anybody who didn't work in software and everybody was comparing themselves and seeing how you measured up (which we didn't).
When we founded JBoss, we were young. We literally had nothing to lose. Marc complained a lot about work. At the time, it didn't seem like such a big risk to leave a corporate job. Anybody in the industry with reasonable skills (or without) could find an equivalent un-fulfilling job several months later, if things didn't pan out. I figured that nine months was reasonable to see if we could cover our expenses, expenses which became a lot lighter when we moved in with my parents.
In the early days I took care of the legal documents, accounting, setting up trainings, our economic life-blood for the first year or so, and basically dabbled in everything else that did not involve engineering. When we moved to Atlanta, our daughter was two. Initially I was going to look for part-time work and help Marc out with JBoss just until "things got off the ground." It quickly became apparent that no other job would provide me the flexibility, fun and pay-off we were seeing in JBoss.
Sales is one thing I've never been good at or enjoyed. We were fortunate enough to have our customers come to us and tell us what they wanted, but it soon became apparent we were leaving a lot of opportunities on the table, for lack of resources. it was a relief when we could hire Ben Sabrin. Having a full-time salesperson really paid off for us. The increased revenues also meant that I could concentrate more on public relations, which I headed until we sold JBoss to Red Hat. Before we had a marketing budget, we had a PR agency and a significant (for us) monthly PR retainer. However, PR, especially in a field like middleware, doesn't work in a vacuum. You have to have a product, customers and a story.
People used to ask us if were cash-flow positive. We couldn't have afforded to be anything else, having lost what savings we had in a previous unsuccessful company. With JBoss, we kept overhead under control, working mostly with consultants until our VC investment made it possible to hire more employees.
What is it like to work with your spouse? Maybe what made it work for us is that we've always worked in different fields, which minimizes the opportunities for friction. The downside of working with your spouse, when you're passionate about what you do, is that the borders between your personal and work life are very thin. We had to make an effort not to talk about work all the time. One day, I read a BusinessWeek article about my husband and JBoss that began with this "La-dee-dah, let's take a look at the demented Fleury family where their six year old daughter talks about whether or not IBM is after them on a Sunday morning" intro. I had gotten used to a certain amount of negative personal attacks in the online media, but it was very painful to have my children brought up in that context.
Selling the company was very hard. I don't think people can appreciate that unless they've done it. The attitude can be--just take your big ass divorce settlement and move on. However, when you're a creative person, it's difficult to give up control. You feel like you've sold your child upriver. JBoss had a very distinctive personality. We spent five years of our life building that company and were very close to so many of the people with whom we worked. We'd lived through a real roller coaster ride together. The difference between something and nothing can turn on a dime. You have a window of opportunity and you need to seize it. You need to make sure that all the struggles weren't for nothing and that you reward the people who've been loyal to you.
Back when we were struggling, I would occasionally run into or read about the Dot Com success stories. I remember thinking how these people were so full of themselves, so convinced that they had worked harder and were smarter than everybody else. The truth is that anybody with an ounce of perspective knows people who are smarter and have worked harder than themselves, people that didn't make it because the timing wasn't right or because of circumstances beyond their control.
We've been very lucky. In this New Year, I look back and am truly grateful for the opportunity we had, for the people we got to know and work with, and for the fun times we had together.
Book Review: The Sum of Our Days, by Isabel Allende
I just finished Isabel Allende's "The Sum of Our Days" (La Suma de los Dias), an autobiographical novel, focusing mostly on the past fifteen or so years of her life in Marin County, California. Since the last thing I read by Isabel was "Eva Luna," many years ago, I was surprised to learn, in a FT interview with Richard Waters, that Isabel has been in California for a while now. I was intrigued enough to buy the book. "The Sum of Our Days" appears to be the continuation of a dialogue with her deceased daughter, Paula, begun in a book of the same name that I have not read.
Since one of the challenges of my life is trying to find a balance between writing and raising four young children, I'm always interested in autobiographical material by authors I like. Mostly I want to know where they get their inspiration and how they find time for their writing. In Isabel's case, it's clear that a lot of this material comes from her own life and the lives of her friends. Some of this drama, you'd be hard pressed to invent, such as the story of her drug-addicted step-daughter's surprise pregnancy, resulting in a delivery in where the the obstetrician has to simultaneously save a premature baby and detox the child, or getting a call during a vacation in India where she learns that her daughter-in-law has run off with her stepson's fiance.
One funny anecdote is her Chilean family's horrified reaction when she uses them for inspiration in her first novel "The House of the Spirits" (her grandmother apparently did dabble in spiritualism; her grandfather was not a rapist and murderer). They only reconciled themselves with the novel when it became a major Hollywood movie, with well-known stars, at which point they decided that Isabel's fictionalized story was their true family history.
She talks frankly about trying the hallucinogenic drug ayahuasca to overcome writer's block, her quest to find and vet a future wife for her son, taking the unsuspecting woman with her on a trip to the Amazon, discusses the highs and lows of her marriage and her time in counseling, her failings as a mother-in-law (she finally has to throw away the key to her son and daughter-in-law's house because she is always popping in unannounced), and her unconventional assembled family, her "tribu" (or tribe). Having enjoyed her fiction, it was nice to learn more about this woman who comes across as amazingly cool on a personal level, in spite of...or more likely, because of the self-awareness with which she discusses her own foibles, an attitude that enables her to appreciate and accept other people, despite their imperfections.
She places strong emphasis on family, especially extended family or the self-elected family of truly close life-long friends. Such an outlook no doubt appears claustrophobic and retrograde in contemporary American culture, with its emphasis on the nuclear family and individualism. However, in Isabel's case, she apparently has a magnetic enough personality (and it comes across in her writing) that "the tribu" includes people like her husband's stepson from a former marriage, her former son-in-law (widower of the deceased daughter), who moves from Spain to the US and moves into her old house, five minutes away, with his new wife and their twin daughters...and lots of other interesting characters.
The anecdote that served as a cautionary tale for me was her story of an encounter with a dentist she meets at a cocktail party. When the dentist learns that she writes novels for a living, he replies that he'd like to write a novel when he retires. The rather defensive Isabel responds that she'd like to extract molars when she retires, referring to the fact that she spends ten hours a day sitting down in front of her computer screen agonizing over word choice, and that writing, for most people who do it well, takes a lot of dedication and large chunks of uninterrupted time.
This makes me think of a conversation I had with a good friend over Christmas. She is trying to talk me into reading Malcom Gladwell's new book: "Outliers, The Story of Success." If you any of you have read Malcolm Gladwell, please tell me what you think he's worth. I've only seen an interview of him on the Daily Show--I'm slightly suspicious of fashionable, media-savvy intellectuals, afraid they'll be innately shallow. Supposedly they ought to be suffering and under-appreciated, right?. Well, anyway, my friend was telling me about Malcolm (or whoever else he filched it from)'s 10,000 hour rule where supposedly anybody can get really good at something if they spend 10,000 hours doing it. I'm not completely convinced that is true. Or maybe it's because, by that metric I'm really behind in my writing career, or I've just gotten distracted along the way.
Since one of the challenges of my life is trying to find a balance between writing and raising four young children, I'm always interested in autobiographical material by authors I like. Mostly I want to know where they get their inspiration and how they find time for their writing. In Isabel's case, it's clear that a lot of this material comes from her own life and the lives of her friends. Some of this drama, you'd be hard pressed to invent, such as the story of her drug-addicted step-daughter's surprise pregnancy, resulting in a delivery in where the the obstetrician has to simultaneously save a premature baby and detox the child, or getting a call during a vacation in India where she learns that her daughter-in-law has run off with her stepson's fiance.
One funny anecdote is her Chilean family's horrified reaction when she uses them for inspiration in her first novel "The House of the Spirits" (her grandmother apparently did dabble in spiritualism; her grandfather was not a rapist and murderer). They only reconciled themselves with the novel when it became a major Hollywood movie, with well-known stars, at which point they decided that Isabel's fictionalized story was their true family history.
She talks frankly about trying the hallucinogenic drug ayahuasca to overcome writer's block, her quest to find and vet a future wife for her son, taking the unsuspecting woman with her on a trip to the Amazon, discusses the highs and lows of her marriage and her time in counseling, her failings as a mother-in-law (she finally has to throw away the key to her son and daughter-in-law's house because she is always popping in unannounced), and her unconventional assembled family, her "tribu" (or tribe). Having enjoyed her fiction, it was nice to learn more about this woman who comes across as amazingly cool on a personal level, in spite of...or more likely, because of the self-awareness with which she discusses her own foibles, an attitude that enables her to appreciate and accept other people, despite their imperfections.
She places strong emphasis on family, especially extended family or the self-elected family of truly close life-long friends. Such an outlook no doubt appears claustrophobic and retrograde in contemporary American culture, with its emphasis on the nuclear family and individualism. However, in Isabel's case, she apparently has a magnetic enough personality (and it comes across in her writing) that "the tribu" includes people like her husband's stepson from a former marriage, her former son-in-law (widower of the deceased daughter), who moves from Spain to the US and moves into her old house, five minutes away, with his new wife and their twin daughters...and lots of other interesting characters.
The anecdote that served as a cautionary tale for me was her story of an encounter with a dentist she meets at a cocktail party. When the dentist learns that she writes novels for a living, he replies that he'd like to write a novel when he retires. The rather defensive Isabel responds that she'd like to extract molars when she retires, referring to the fact that she spends ten hours a day sitting down in front of her computer screen agonizing over word choice, and that writing, for most people who do it well, takes a lot of dedication and large chunks of uninterrupted time.
This makes me think of a conversation I had with a good friend over Christmas. She is trying to talk me into reading Malcom Gladwell's new book: "Outliers, The Story of Success." If you any of you have read Malcolm Gladwell, please tell me what you think he's worth. I've only seen an interview of him on the Daily Show--I'm slightly suspicious of fashionable, media-savvy intellectuals, afraid they'll be innately shallow. Supposedly they ought to be suffering and under-appreciated, right?. Well, anyway, my friend was telling me about Malcolm (or whoever else he filched it from)'s 10,000 hour rule where supposedly anybody can get really good at something if they spend 10,000 hours doing it. I'm not completely convinced that is true. Or maybe it's because, by that metric I'm really behind in my writing career, or I've just gotten distracted along the way.
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