The Boy Who Could Do Anything

This handsome devil is my boyfriend. Jealous?
(Photo: Rosella Eleanor LaFevre)

I have a favor to ask of you, my lovelies.

My darling, Christopher Doctor, is at work on his own novel. It's called THE BOY WHO COULD DO ANYTHING. He started it a while ago and he's finally back at it. The thing is, he's kind of an instant gratification addict and really wants to know what others think of it.

Would you please take some time out of your day to read the following excerpt, the prologue to TBWCDA, and tell us what you think?

Read the excerpt after the break.

Fairy Tales and Real Life

As a writer, I've long mined my personal experiences -- and exploited those of some of my closest friends and family -- for stories. But through a compost process, I take my own experiences and those of others I know and combine them, filling in the holes as I go with my own imagination.

One thing I've never really given myself credit for is living a life interesting enough to write about without expansion and exaggeration. Maybe that's why I've been fascinated by memoirs lately. Some of my favorite memoirs include Anna Fields' Confessions of a Rebel Debutante and Cyndy Drew Etler's Straightling. Now I'm reading My Week with Marilyn, the memoir by Colin Clark, the young man who got his first job in the film industry, working as third assistant director on The Prince and the Showgirl.

I'm only a few pages in and already I'm delighted by Clark's literary style and, surely, intrigued by the experiences that provided Michelle Williams the opportunity to step inside Marily Monroe's skin. Here, I'll share with you the first paragraph of the memoir, which immediately struck me.

"All my life I have kept diaries, but this is not one of them. This is a fairy story, an interlude, an episode outside time and space which nevertheless was real. And why not? I believe in magic. My life and most people's lives are a series of little miracles -- strange coincidences which spring from uncontrollable impulses and give rise to incomprehensible dreams. We spend a lot of time pretending that we are normal, but underneath the surface each one of us knows that he or she is unique."

While reading, I often highlight or note with a pen those passages which strike me as profound and relevant to real, everyday life. This passage is now between blue ink brackets to be referred to again and again.

Have you read any memoirs? Which are your favorites?

(Above photo property of the Weinstein Group. I'm just borrowing it.)

Getting Back into the Swing (Plus an Excerpt)

Last week, I started writing again. Spurred on by all the great reading I've been doing and my coversations with Cyndy Drew Etler, a writer who is self-publishing her memoir, Straightling, I knew it was time I got back to my old self. I've always defined myself as a fiction writer but after the fall 2010 semester, I really hadn't written much. I needed to get back to that person.

So I've been working on this novel I'd gotten the idea for a while ago. And it's slow-going but I really think what I've got so far is beautiful.

I decided that I'll share an excerpt from it with you. Read the excerpt after the break.

Beth Kephart on Writing Slowly

About a year ago, when I was working for two.one.five magazine, I got the chance to interview Beth Kephart, author of several books. She is a true poet and an inspiration. I just read this on her blog and had to share:

"There are great pleasures in writing a book at a quiet pace, in writing toward the not easily known. You steep until the material owns you. You steep, you read, you keep consulting those maps, you watch those films, you listen to those people speaking their foreign tongues until they don't sound so foreign after all. And then one day you wake up, and you own it. One day it's not about what you are studying, but what you know. It takes time." 

A Love Poem

I'm a little obsessed with Marilyn Monroe after seeing My Week with Marilyn. Here's a piece from a poem she wrote about her third husband, Arthur Miller. Hope your 2012 is filled with love and happiness!

Old Notes on Life

Life is all in the little things, isn't it? Life is the stuff all wrapped up and gifted to us in the tiny moments, the brief and fleeting images right before our eyes.


I'm letting life drift by. I'm scared but I wonder if this isn't my coping mechanism, a distraction from the anxiety of having to live well, of having to find happiness in small things. I don't know what my obsession with "BIG" everything is. I want everything to be big and noted, I want every moment to drip with the juice of big, serious meaning.


I must learn to stop and smell the roses. I must learn to take everything in, to accept that sometimes it rains and sometimes the sun shines. It doesn't have to hold a deeper meaning. I should just accept the way the sun feels on my skin, how the rain drops feel on my arms and legs.


Tomorrow I will try just being, just following the moments of the day as they morph and flow into memories. I have to find the life in the small things, suckle the sweet nectar of life from the bud of the day.


I wrote these words on June 30, 2009 and found them in an old journal today. The 30 or so pages written in the big beautiful red journal gifted to me on my 18th birthday contain some really poetic thoughts that blow me away. Did I really write these words?

Honestly, it's been a long time since I wrote down my reflections on my nature, my life and our whole big, silly world. Old readers of this blog will have noticed my lack of really personal reflections of late. (I'm sorry if you really enjoyed them.)

I fell in love close to two years ago now and I've been working really hard in school and on outside activities. There's been very little time to sit and ponder how I feel about things and what I think of life.

For a very long time, I searched, high and low, for the meaning of life. I thought that I could make sense of it all by writing about my boring life. I thought writing would make my life interesting.

Turns out, I finally got it right on June 30, 2009, and while it took me a while to actually do so, I have just been. I have followed the moments of the day as they morph and flow into memories. I have found the life in the small things. I have suckled the sweet nectar of life from the bud of the day.

Life isn't always what you hoped for or what you expected, but at least you're alive. Right?

3 Great Ugly-Duckling-Gets-Made-Over Movies

Right around this time of the year, I start wanting to give myself a whole new look. This is probably inspired by my love of the three movies listed below. I watched them all repeatedly when I was a kid, and as one who was frequently teased, I always hoped that I could get made over and change my life.

Never Been Kissed (1999)
This film, starring Drew Barrymore, is one of my favorites. Josie Geller, a less-than-memorable editor at the Chicago Sun-Times, gets her first assignment: to go undercover as a high school student. For Geller, who barely survived high school the first time around, this is mixed blessing. In the process, she makes friends with the popular crowd and falls in love with teacher Sam Coulson (Michael Vartan). And in the end, when she's standing on the pitcher's mound waiting for Sam to give her her first kiss, she's gorgeous.

The Princess Diaries (2001)
Mia Thermopolis is one of my favorite heroines. I loved the books and the movie is fantastic. Mia, an unsightly 15-year-old, finds out that she's actually a princess, and her super chic grandmother, Queen Clarisse Rinaldi, gives her princess lessons and Paolo, a pompous gay man who considers himself a great artiste, gives her a makeover. And with one look at the results, it's clear that he knows something. I just love this one!

She's All That (1999)
Rachel Leigh Cook plays Laney Boggs, a high school student very serious about her art but not her appearance. Zach Siler (Freddie Prinze), recently dumped by his popular girlfriend for a reality TV star (played by Matthew Lillard), makes a bet that he can clean up any girl and make her popular. Laney is the victim of the bet but the beneficiary of Zach's lesbian sister's make-up skills. I always wished I could meet a Zach who would make me over and fall in love in the process.

My Latest Obsessions

I have kind of an addictive personality. And these are the things I've been obsessed with lately (and most of them are food/drink related):

- Magazines: This one's kind of a life-long deal. My latest faves: Marie Claire, Vanity Fair, Esquire.

- Smores pizza at Maxi's (Liacouras Walk, Philadelphia, PA): This is nutella, fluff and cinnamon & butter blended together on pizza crust. Just yummy.

- Hot chocolate at Good Karma 2 Cafe (928 Pine Street, Philadelphia, PA): I never used to like regular hot chocolate but whatever they do to their hot chocolate at this place, it's incredibly scrumptious.

- Sweet Iced Tea at Eppy's Steaks (a truck at Montgomery and 13th Streets, Philadelphia, PA): As the girl who turned me onto it said, "It's like crack."

- The Vampire Diaries: I know, I know. It's so cheesy. But I just love it. And I'm kind of dying that there won't be a new episode until January.

Cool Reads: 11/17/11

For Felicity Jones, Her Clothes Play the Role, Too - Journalist Courtney Rubin got a lot of great information, anecdotes and quotes from actress Felicity Jones in this piece about how Jones greatly influenced the costumes of her character in the much-talked about indie film, Like Crazy, in which she stars alongside Anton Yelchin.

Marilyn Minter's Oozing Desire - Linda Yablonsky writes about artist Minter's slow-motion video "“I’m Not Much But I’m All I Think About" in great detail -- with lots of $10 words. Some of them she made up, I think, but still an interesting read and a great reminder that you should use great, unusual words.

Fatties Need Love Too (An Uncool Read)

I'm sorry, but I have a bit of trouble with women who think a size 12 is fat and that a man can't love them when they've gained a few pounds. And bam! There in the back of the November 2011 issue of one of my favorite magazines, Marie Claire, is an article titled "Til Pounds Do Us Part." Written by Theresa O'Rourke, the piece is about how the author gained some weight and the weight was coming between her and her husband.

O'Rourke begins the piece with five paragraphs about her and her weight gain. Altogether the piece is 17 paragraphs long. She only really gets to talking about her "rock-star lean" husband in the seventh paragraph, which suggests to me that her piece is less about her husband than the weight gain. And possibly the piece is really about how her husband's view of her was influenced by her own feelings that she wasn't sexy.

Her husband comments in the twelfth paragraph that if she looked like she had when they married, they'd "have 10 kids by now" and this triggers "the most honest talk we've ever had," O'Rourke writes.

Her conclusion is that her husband's laziness influenced her and thus she gained weight. "For every way we enriched each other's bad habits, we had caught each other's bad habits, too, like a cold," O'Rourke writes. "And we knew that without care, we would just keep passing them around."

Still, after this, she concludes that the "care" had to begin with her and so she joins a gym. That's how she wraps it up. Really?! This piece at 740 words tries, but fails to make any single, strong point.

If the wedded couple were at fault for each other's flaws, then why weren't the two of them going to the gym together? (And as an aside, if the husband is so rock-star lean, then how was it his laziness that made her lazy?)

Also, she mentions stress causing her to drink a little more than usual at the beginning of the article. Might not her inability to handle stress productively be part of the problem?

Furthermore, if the author's own unease with her body -- and her mentioned unsightly wardrobe -- are really to blame for her husband's own lackluster feelings for her new shape, then what about dealing with her own issues? There are skinny women who have expressed disease with their lack of curves. If O'Rourke really gained the weight in the "right" places, i.e. her breasts and butt, then what's so bad with her new shape? Google image-search the words "5'3 and 165 pounds," which is how much she weighed after gaining pounds, you'll see some normal-looking women.

What's wrong with normal or even slightly overweight women? Especially if you own it?

So, I beg of you, what was the point of "Til Pounds Do Us Part"? Journalistically, it definitely could use some work. For any modern-day feminist, it's a bit of an outrage.