For What It's Worth

Her Teenage Werewolf

My friend, Lauren Kessler, is not only an incredibly prolific published writer, she is also a ridiculously trusting mother. I say this with great affection for her but I simply can't ignore her insanely risky choice to co-write a blog with her teenage daughter.

 

Lauren -- an occasional presence here at FWIW -- offers the DL on her latest adventure:

"Yes...it's true.  Lizzie and I have launched a mother-daughter blog.  We're writing our way through the sturm und drang of teenagehood... about the things that divide and unite us... offering our distinct teen girl/ midlife mother slant on such subjects as: hot guys, junk food and what we want to be when we grow up."  

You can visit it now and watch and read about Lauren's high-wire act of parenthood "live," as it's happening. Or maybe LIzzie is the brave one here; I'm not so sure.

As I understand it, though, Lauren and Lizzie will be blogging about the regular stuff --movies, music, Facebook surveys -- as well as those other things that cause moms and daughters to, well, yell at each other, often loudly. I take Lauren at her word that her relationship with Lizzie has been "sometimes stormy." This means, to me, that there'll be some juicy conflict ginned up from time-to-time about everything from homework, to online overdosing to school night bedtimes -- and even the challenging stuff like boys & sex. 

 

But back to the Two-L's and the method to their madness. There's also a book coming out on August 5 which -- surprise -- can be pre-ordered now from Amazon. Here's the blurb on that.

A bestselling journalist navigates the stormy seas of the mother-daughter relationship as she strives to understand her charming, alarming almost-teen daughter.

The book that tries to answer the question plaguing every mother-of-a-teen: What is the worst time in a woman’s life – when she was 13… or when her daughter is?

With the keen eye of a reporter, the deep curiosity of an anthropologist and the open – and sometimes wounded – heart of a mother, award-winning author Lauren Kessler embeds herself in her about-to-be-teenage daughter’s life. In seventh and eighth grade classrooms, at home, online, at the mall, and at summer camp, Kessler observes, investigates, chronicles – and sometimes participates in – the life of a 21st century teen.

As she begins to better understand and appreciate her mercurial daughter, their often troubled relationship – at first a mirror of the author’s difficult relationship with her own mother – slowly, bumpily moves in new directions. With the help of a resident teen expert (her daughter), teachers, doctors, therapists and other mothers, Kessler illuminates the age-old mother-daughter struggle from both sides, gracefully interweaving personal experience with journalistic inquiry. Funny, harrowing, poignant and invariably insightful, My Teenage Werewolf explores the fascinating and scary world of today’s teen as it comes to grips with the single most important relationship in a woman’s life.

My only regret as the father of a daughter who just survived teenhood and is about to graduate spectacularly from UCSB and make her father very proud is that I didn't have Lauren's book as a reference. My wife and I had to do this flying blind!

Having Writ, Moving On

Lauren Kessler is an author, narrative journalist and director of the literary non-fiction graduate program at the University of Oregon who blogs at Thin House.

I was down at UPS yesterday arranging to have the final edited version of my manuscript sent back to my editor in New York.

“Another book?”  the woman behind the counter asked, all smiles.  She’s been following my work for a while now.  “You must be so excited!”

Actually, not. 

I’m more like…deflated.  Depressed, even.

When I’m excited is when I’m writing, when I’m immersed in a subject, hip-deep in the world of the book, energy focused, all cylinders firing.  The excitement begins to mount somewhere around chapter four.  By then I’ve found a way into the book.  I’m warmed up.  I am seeing the possibilities, and the narrative is starting to make itself visible.  Around chapter four I am keenly aware of the difficulties I face, of the challenges I will encounter and have to master if the book is to be successful.  But, unlike in the throes of chapter one, two and often three, I am not in a state of semi-paralysis, fearful that I am not, nor will I ever be, up to the task at hand.  By chapter four I have a toe-hold.  I am by then – biochemically speaking -- scared enough to have a good adrenaline rush going but not so scared as to be awash in cortisol.  I am alive, alert and ready for action.

More than that:  I am thrilled to be so thoroughly absorbed.  My life takes on a shape.  There is order to my days.  Order to my reading, my thinking, my conversation, even my dreaming.  The book is like a planet, and I am its moon.  I love the tug of that gravitational pull.  I don’t ever want to be released.

Lawn, Lawn Ago

Lauren Kessler is an author, narrative journalist and director of the literary non-fiction graduate program at the University of Oregon who blogs at Thin House.

What’s up with lawns?

Why is our default national landscaping a vast, green, weedless expanse of Kentucky bluegrass? Why do most American front yards look like putting greens?

Back in the day (as in up to the early 1800s), golf-course style lawns did not exist in America.  The typical front yard was packed dirt with space for a kitchen or cottage garden. Lawns were for the ultra-wealthy – European nobles who had so much land they had the luxury of not using all of it for food production or animal grazing and so much money that they could afford full-time groundskeepers. In fact, the rolling manicured lawn was a public announcement of wealth, just as, at the time, being corpulent was a proud indication that you had enough resources to keep yourself very very well fed.I like what David Beaulieu, landscape and garden writer, has to say about the modern American obsession with lawns:  “…our desire to impose our will on nature would seem to be the predominant factor behind the hegemony of the lawn.” And “…the lawn is meant to showcase the diligence of the person who owns it, not the plants themselves.” Because grass is, well, boring.

Today, 58 million Americans spend approximately $30 billion a year to maintain more than 23 million acres of lawn.

The lawns in the United States consume around 270 billion gallons of water a week.

The Reluctant Blogger Bites the Hand...

Lauren Kessler is an author, narrative journalist and director of the literary nonfiction graduate program at the University of Oregon. 

“My name is Lauren Kessler, and I am a blogger.”

“Hello, Lauren.” 

Had anyone told me a year ago that I’d be blogging, I would have cringed.  I am not a fan of blogs.  I find most to be self-indulgent drivel and fervently wish that the people who spend their time writing them didn’t have quite so much time.  I am sure there are important community service projects they could be doing.  Volunteering at the hospital.  Collecting soup can labels to fund music classes at their kid’s school.  Something.  

Yes, there are a few interesting political blogs, and a few interesting insider blogs, and occasionally a really smart person will start a really smart blog or an important and worthwhile idea will be blog-supported.  And then there are those obviously brilliant blogs that take note of my books.  But of the – gasp – approximately 113 million blogs out there, most are written by every day folks with less-than-fascinating lives about which they have less-than-noteworthy insights which they freely express in less-than-competent prose.  Hooray that people are writing!  Writing is good.  Hooray for citizen whatever.  It’s publishing the stuff I object to.  

I know the internet is infinitely expandable, but just because there’s space doesn’t mean it has to be occupied, does it?  Some of us out here in the west like wide open spaces.  Technorati, the site that tracks and rates blogs, claims that a new blog is created every 5.8 seconds. That means that in the time it took you to read this far, seven new blogs came into existence.  Wired magazine reports that 2.3 content updates are posted every second.  Is there really that much to say?  

The Book Is Dead. Not!

Rumors of Death...

This essay was originally published in Etude magazine.

The Book Is Dead.

That’s the title of the book I’m currently reading.  Of course the fact that this book was written and published, that I bought it and am reading it would seem a powerful argument against its main premise.

In fact, 172,000 books were published in the U.S. last year.  If you count vanity press and print-on-demand, a new book of fiction is right now being published every 30 minutes in America.  How can the book be dead?

There are several good answers to this.  First of all, most of those hundred thousand-plus books are essentially moribund, gathering dust on the acres of bookcases installed in megastores to lend them gravitas.  Actually, as a Viking publisher remarked a while ago, “everyone is reading the same 20 books.”  The miles of aisles at B&N and Borders are just, in the words of a B&N honcho, “wallpaper” – background decoration so that the place feels literary. The people coming in to buy one of those 20 anointed books want to browse for a while, sit in an armchair, sip a latte and feel ensconced in the world of books – of which eight out of ten flop in the marketplace. They die – mostly swiftly – moved from the front of the store “new” table to back shelf in three weeks, from shelf to return carton in two months and from there to $1.95 online sellers and Costco remainder bins.