How did we blow past Thanksgiving already? Is the speeding of time a feature of getting older? Am I going to be on my death bed soon wondering how the hell that happened? The answer is, of course. Sometimes I’m still in a state of dull shock when I realize it’s no longer 1998. Then I look in the mirror at the little furrow between my eyebrows that used to only be there when I woke up in the mornings and my head explodes.
That furrow is a permanent resident on my face now, and will do nothing but deepen. I named that furrow George W. Bush. I have not yet decided which of my body’s signs of aging I will call Dick Cheney. I may be saving that one for something chronic, painful, and insidious, like an ulcer.
But, let’s talk about something brighter than my inexorable decay. Guess what? 13 rue Thérèse was nominated for an award! The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, to be exact. Pretty sweet, no? It’s always lovely to be surprised by a bit recognition from the outside world as I toil in my writerly cave. It gets pretty hermity in here. (I just looked up the correct adjectival form of “hermit” and it’s “heremitic,” but I much prefer “hermity.”)
Speaking of the writerly cave, I did a revision of In the Red over the past couple of months. I am going to give it another once-over, then send it along to my agent. It’s always weird to have another human being read something that’s been simmering sealed away in my head for years. It’s a real passage, and it always comes with a big dose of trepidation. I was once asked by an interviewer about what my greatest fear is when I turn in a manuscript. I said that turning in a manuscript is like trying to tell someone about an intense dream you had: it may just turn out to be incoherent hash and leave you looking like an idiot. Scary, no, when you spend a couple of years and 80000 words telling the dream?
Elena Mauli Shapiro 