Nancy Rommelmann

Uncommon Youth: The Gilded Life and Tragic Times of J. Paul Getty III

My first book review for the Wall Street Journal is online, and in the print edition tomorrow, May 22. I am so pleased about writing for the WSJ, an idea I had about six weeks ago, asking a friend on-staff for an introduction. The editor suggested three books, all of which were bull's eyes.

The lede:

J. Paul Getty III and Charles Fox met for the last time over lunch in 2001. Both men were confined to wheelchairs: Fox from multiple sclerosis, Getty from a 1981 drug-overdose-induced stroke that left him paralyzed and nearly blind at the age of 25. They sat by the swimming pool of Getty's Hollywood estate, the air hot and "jasmine-scented," as Getty's former wife, his mother and various people tended him. Though Getty communicated only in "small, indecipherable clicks," one of the entourage translated for Fox: "He says he wants you to write his story."

Read the whole thing here.

Genre Books: Are You With Me?

It was 3:14 in the morning. She couldn't sleep. She gathered her things in the dark--water bottle, iPad--and tripped on her shoes on the way to the spare bedroom. She didn't want to read the book(s) she was in the middle of. What had she read earlier on her pal David Wolman's page? Something about the sinking of a WW II ship...

And so she bought it, with 1-click. Her face was lit by the moony glow of the screen as she read IN HARM'S WAY: The Sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of its Survivors, captivated by passages like:

Before being assigned to the Indy, in November 1944, McCoy had spent two months as part of a marine assault on the island of Peleliu, a hellish, confusing place where he contracted malaria. The fighting had been vicious, and often it was hand to hand. The dead bodies piled up around McCoy and would hiss and explode in the sun as he hunkered in the mud and coral, praying the mortars would miss him.

And she realized she had found her genre book, war history. And she wondered who was with her, and what they recommend.

The Shelter Cycle, by Peter Rock

My review, from the Sunday Oregonian. A clip:

Let us talk about deeply imagined fiction, Mary Gaitskill's "Veronica" and the stories of Paul Bowles and now Peter Rock's "The Shelter Cycle," books that follow no familiar path; which have their own logic and music and jags that can leave the reader feeling strapped to the back of a toboggan, on a journey to who knows where, watch that turn! Feeling just on the edge of trusting the author is going to get us out alive, get this story birthed, maybe in the middle of a forest in the snow, a metaphor and actual location for the book in question.

Rock reads tonight from the book, at Powell's City of Books, at 7:30pm

 

Come One! Come All! Yon Smallpressapalooza #6!

Have you been to the Small Press section of Powell's lately? It is seriously one of the sexiest parts of the store. Come hear 13 of its authors in action: Oregon Book Award finalist Carrie Seitzinger! Memoirists Lindsey Kugler and Chloe Caldwell! Zinester Aaron Dactyl (Railroad Semantics), novelist Barry Graham, fiction writers Nancy Rommelmann, Janey Smith, and Jeremy Robert Johnson! Poets W. Vandoren Wheeler, Thomas Patrick Levy, Mindy Nettifee, Donald Dunbar, and Susan Denning! Hosted by inimitable master of ceremonies and Powell's small press champion, Kevin Sampsell!

Monday, March 18, 6pm - 10pm.

Powell's City of Books, 1005 W. Burnside, Portland

I read from Transportation at 8:30.

 

Sunday Great Book: Jan Yoors, "Crossing"

I found the book Crossing: A journal of survival and resistance in World War II among my mother's books, when I was about age seventeen. I see, now, that it is inscribed to her ("Kathy... to continue the dialogue. Affectionately - Jan Yoors, July 1971"). At the time, the book meant a great deal to me, both because of the work itself and for personal reasons.

Yoors, born in Belguim in 1922, was the son of artists. At age 12, he left home, with his parents' consent, to live and travel with a band of Romany, or gypsies. (More about this I would learn when I read Yoors' 1967 book, The Gypsies.) Crossing dealt chiefly with his and his tribe's surviving Nazi-occupied Europe; how they were hunted down by the Gestapo; how Yoors persuaded many in the tribe to join the resistance, and how -- and this I will never forget -- the Romany would sometimes sneak into concentration camps in order to sabotage from within. To say the story was gripping is very much an understatement.

There were other reasons, however, that I was so taken with Yoors and the gypsies. I had recently left one life I had been leading, and was trying to be reabsorbed into the life I had originally left. It wasn't working. I felt the perenial outsider, comfortable no place. I wanted very much no home to go to, I stayed outside all the time, walking, wandering. I wanted to be a gypsy, probably not an unusual fantasy for a teenager. I thought, however, I had some claim: I learned, from Yoors's books, that the gypsies adopted certain surnames, Cooper and Smith (which makes sense for traveling people, to work on metal pots and with horses), Evans, Luda or Louda... my great-grandmother's last name was Luda, sometimes spelled Louda. She'd come from Bohemia. There was also the root of my own last name. Let me tell you, these were enough for me.

I wanted to be brave, as brave as Yoors had described himself and his tribe being. I wanted to need nobody. I spent a few months trying to learn Romany, and have just now found tucked into the pages of Crossing notes that I wrote, translated phrases useful (Zhan le Devlasa tai sastismasa - "Go with God and in good health") and less useful (Te avel angla I Mule - "In honor of the ancestral spirit, the Mule."). I held on to the idea that I was part gypsy for the better part of a decade. If there is any truth to it, it is lost to time.

That said, the photo below is of a gypsy girl, and I must say, I think our faces near identical.

Saturday Great Book (Special Monday Edition!): Sterling Hayden, "Wanderer"

How and why I picked up Wanderer, Sterling Hayden's 1976 memoir of defying Hollywood and the courts and setting sail for the South Seas with his four children, is lost to time. I can tell you, it was more than 10 years ago. That it may have been prompted by my going weak in the knees watching Hayden in The Asphalt Jungle, in The Killing, that I find him extraordinarily sexy and persuasive even while being shot by Al Pacino in The Godfather. That I once gave a copy to writer William Langewiesche, and that the actor Jim Beaver and I became friends, if virtually, after he saw on Goodreads that Wanderer is one of my favorite books and wondered what the hell kind of gal would think so. Maybe one who has three clipper ships tattoed on her arm, who has told everyone who loves her and might be around when she dies to please dump her body in the ocean, just dump it, that she might not even mind drowning if it means that's where she ends up.

 

Saturday Great Book: Joan Didion's "After Henry"

Great books, in my opinion, brought to you every Saturday. First up: Joan Didion's After Henry, a collection of nonfiction essays, many of which appeared in the New York Review of Books. Didion was the first to speak earlier in the month at the Review's 50th anniversary party in NY, which I attended. She read from Sentimental Journeys, about the Central Park jogger case. She was, at the time of its publication, pilloried. Editor Robert Silvers said the paper rarely had received as much castigating mail. When the alleged rapists were released, after wrongly serving more than a decade in prison, the silence from said castigators was deafening. Writers like Didion, and I hope myself in some small way, do their best to ammonia the sentimental, the popular, the easy from the windscreen, to show where we are and where we are going. 

"We Live in Water," by Jess Walter

My review of the story collection, We Live in Water, by Jess Walter, which runs tomorrow in the Sunday Oregonian. A clip:

In 1993, Robert Altman released the dramatic comedy "Short Cuts." Based on the stories of Raymond Carver, the film resituated the action from the Pacific Northwest to Los Angeles. With the exception of the quality of light, the location change did not matter, longing and loss pretty much playing out in the mountains as they do in the valley.

Twenty years later, Jess Walter brings love and death back to the Northwest with the story collection "We Live in Water." New century, new troubles: If Carver's characters were made to deal with medflies and drive-by shootings, Walter's must navigate meth and a beached economy and the occasional zombie barista. If that last has you thinking you are in for some laughs, you are, though often the kind where you go "ow ow ow" instead of "ha ha ha."

What does not change are the ways people pretend the scratching at the door is not the destinies of their own making. Walter's lead characters, men all, seem particularly lashed to the wheel of misfortune, as though fate is saying, "OK, bub, here's how it's going to be: you're going to tank." And the men, waking from a year, a lifetime, of bad decisions, scan the horizon for a way out as their figurative boots fill with water.

Do check it out - I liked the book a lot. It's on sale at Powell's, where Walter reads March 3.

Literature, Coffee, Beer: Transportation in Miami

We are here in balmy Miami, drinking the best coffee in Florida roasted and purveyed by our friends Joel and Leticia Pollock of Panther Coffee. The beautiful Leticia--with an assist from John Hood and seemingly every other cool fast person in Miami--is throwing a book party tomorrow evening. I'll read from Transportation, we will drink some coffee and Cava, and talk books and whatever else you like on Panther's smashing new outdoor plaza.

In the meantime, I am imaging all the ways I can tell the guys who run Beached Miami how smashing their coverage of the event is, primo primo el supremo. Check it. Thanks guys, and the rest of you, see you tomorrow.

"Transportation" Review: On the black edge of fear, desire and despair (The Sunday Oregonian)

The Sunday Oregonian, Janaury 20, 2013

by Anne Saker

Confession here: I am an utter wimp where the macabre is concerned. But the haunting weirdness of Nancy Rommelmann's new collection of stories, "Transportation," still lives with me.

Rommelmann, a well-known Portland voice whose keen-edged writing appears in local publications, including The Oregonian, is just plain daring and courageous in this volume. She dives into some strange pockets of the human soul and swims a line right on the blackest edge of fear, desire and despair. She whips out a dazzling array of techniques and wields them masterfully.

I nearly stopped reading "Transportation" after finishing the first story, "The White Coyote," not because it's bad but because it just freaked me out. The eponymous creature was injected at birth with human DNA, and in its youth appears an interesting freak, something brought to the local elementary school for the kids to gape at.

But time is no friend to this animal. In its dotage, the white coyote looks an awful lot like an old human man, but acts like a beast, flaunting its sexual threat and then carrying it out in a way that left me completely creeped out.

Then I crashed head-on into "X-Girl," about a woman who sexually taunts a man she knows, a butcher by trade. He sends her a blunt warning of how he will punish her teasing. When she ignores the warning, he carries out his promise in a fashion appropriate to his profession. Rommelmann is so good that I got to the end thinking, "I guess I see now how something like that might happen."

"Transportation" doesn't let up. A particularly cunning effort is "Balzek," about an artist who is determined to eat his own body for his next exhibition. "Save Yourself" is a life-after-death fantasy. Then Rommelmann throws in a beautifully cut coming-of-age story, "Tom Moore," that is moody and gray until the last sentence, when the sun bursts through.

It's exciting to see writers like Rommelmann working on the short story because of the discipline the form commands. Digressions are death, and focus must burn on its aim. Brevity commanded Rommelman to carve away the extraneous, and what is left is shocking and amazing. The words she did not write are the most powerful of all.

-- Anne Saker is a former staff writer at The Oregonian

What We Must Read: Barry Lopez "Sliver of Sky", Terrence Holt "In the Valley of the Kings"

I have been reading Terrence Holt's story collection, In the Valley of the Kings. I bought the book after learning that Holt is Junot Diaz's favorite author ("There is no one in the wide sea of English who writes like him [as far as I know]; no one who is so profound and mysterious, so searingly human and so implacably apocalyptic..."). The stories grabbed me very quickly, and I mean this literally; I felt variously as though the air was being pressed out of me, and that I was being cast to the void. Holt wrote and taught writing before enrolling in medical school; he is currently a practicing physician. But to state that last seems redundant: Holt in both his guises is telling us what is going on here and in "realms outside the scope of ordinary existence." It is overly self-laudatory but I will write it anyway: I keep seeing similarities to what informs Holt's stories and some in Transportation, particularly the title story.

Tonight I read Barry Lopez's "Silver of Sky," which appears as memoir in the January issue of Harper's. It's behind a pay-wall but go ahead and subscribe, it's $16.95. What Lopez has written had to be written and must be read. It's about the sexual abuse he experienced as a child; what does and does not happen when you do and do not expose the savagery. You will, I am sure, want, as did I, to grab Harry Shier by the throat, to shame him deeply, yes for what he did, and also for the compounding he was willing to do. And for what others, due to their own fears and rationalizations (cue Penn State anthem) are not willing to do. Lopez, a National Book Award winner and a friend, has thought long about this and writes the following:

A more obvious question I asked myself as I grew older was: How could my mother not have known? Perhaps she did, although she died, a few years after she was told, unwilling to discuss her feelings about what had gone on in California. I’ve made some measure of peace with her stance. When certain individuals feel severely threatened — emotionally, financially, physically — the lights on the horizon they use to orient themselves in the world might easily wink out. Life can then become a series of fear-driven decisions and compulsive acts of self-protection. People start to separate what is deeply troubling in their lives from what they see as good. To use the usual metaphor, they isolate the events from one another by storing them in different rooms in a large hotel. While these rooms share a corridor, they do not communicate directly with one another.

I’m not able, today, to put the image I have of my mother as her children’s attentive guardian together with the idea of her as an innocent, a person blinded by the blandishments of a persistent pedophile. But for whatever reason, she was not able, back then, to consider what might be happening in the hours after she saw Shier drive away, her son’s head, from her point of view on the porch, not quite clearing the sill of the car window as the two of them departed.

Reading one of these works in a week would be enough to knock one silent for a while. Reading both, today, made me need to tell you.

Thank You, Powell's City of Books

Thank you

TRANSPORTATION, and the Company it Brings

On January 1 of this year, I released The Queens of Montague Street, a memoir of growing up in 1970s Brooklyn Heights. Last week, Longreads named it one of the Top 10 of 2012 Nonfiction reads. Others include John Branch's epic Snowfall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek (NYT), and Pamela's Colloff's wrenching and masterful The Innocent Man (Texas Monthly - be sure to read both parts!). Talk about ending the year in fantastic company.

And nice timing: my new book, Transportation: Stories, also came out last week, and is now available on Amazon, in paperback and Kindle. Authors Dana Spiotta, Karen Karbo and Deborah Reed offered generous blurbs for the cover, there are book parties and readings to come; the book is essentially a little fuel in the engine.

I had no idea, when I was typing Queens last New Year's Day, that the work would travel beyond my blog. Perhaps on this day next year, I can write about where Transportation has been, how the stories, like little emissaries, move people, including me, from one place to another.

I am reading a book right now that does exactly this: Terrence Holt's In the Valley of the Kings, a collection whose stories occur just outside the sightline, into the metaphysical and the terror and divine. The title story of Transportation is informed by understanding near-identical to the stories in ...Kings (which I had never heard of until last week), so much that I keep thinking I must send it to Holt, as if to say, I understand this thing, too, or am trying to, or this tiny little part of it.

More great company xx

Gene Weingarten, Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald, and the Indefensible Ethics of Journalism

Boy, do I love the writing of Gene Weingarten, his boldness and subtlety and truth-telling, his subjects, his hyper-critical eye and his kindness, all of it works for me. A brilliant example: this December 5 piece from the Washington Post, on convicted family killer Jeffrey MacDonald, whose case every long-form journalist is well familiar with, because of the ethical snares writers Joe McGinniss and Janet Malcolm found themselves traversing, ducking, becoming impaled on, in their books respective books, Fatal Vision and The Journalist and the Murderer. The issues--of what you share with your subjects, of how you gain their trust and whether you deserve it, of how far you can and should push and who you're helping, who you're hurting--can never be empirically answered. You decide boundaries on the fly, you make the phone call that is going to make the person on the other end cry. Sometimes, they surprise you. Sometimes, they stonewall, only to come back two years last and say, "I'm ready to talk now." Tell yourself, people need to tell their stories, that this is what you're here for, that you try, on your best days, to be of service, or, in the words of a friend, "to add to the well of Truth we all drink from." Trust me, there is no time to get cocky about this, because you will certainly spend years of your life getting it quasi- or very wrong before you get it right, if you ever do. Weingarten does.

"Beside the Sea" and Amanda Stott-Smith

I have been working mostly in a vacuum for 3.5 years a book about Amanda Stott-Smith and what led her to drop her children from the Sellwood Bridge in May 23, 2009, and then last week I am asked twice by the media for an update on this work, the first time by Alison Hallett, in a piece about the new Alison Barker translation of Beside the Sea, just out from Tin House, and the second by a TV station, who will film on Friday. I admit to having trepidation about the latter, as I told Hillary Johnson at Dymaxicon, "I feel very weird being interviewed." To which she replied, "Now you know how the people you interview feel."

Ristretto Reading Series: Audrey Braud/Deborah Reed, "Fortune's Deadly Descent"

This Wednesday, October 10, 7pm, Ristretto Reading Series is very pleased to present an evening with author Deborah Reed, writing under her pen name Audrey Braun and reading from her new thriller, Fortune’s Deadly Descent. The second in the Fortune series trilogy – A Small Fortune was called “a polished page-turner. Braun writes with verve and confidence in this stunning debut” (IndieReader) – the book is fast-paced, sexy and dangerous. What more could you want in a heroine? Reed/Braun will have all her books available for sale and signing.

This event will be the first at Ristretto Roasters’ new northwest location in the Schoolhouse Electric Building, a seriously glamorous space. Come and see.

Ristretto Roasters Nicolai, 2181 N. Nicolai Street, Portland

Coffee, tea and snacks will be served. Wine graciously provided by Anne Amie Vineyards. This event is free and open to everyone, as are all Ristretto Reading Series events. More info at www.ristrettoroasters.com

Early reviews for Fortune’s Deadly Descent:

"The trip is worth taking...as a shift in perspective shows that nothing is what it first seemed to be in Fortune’s Deadly Descent." — The Washington Post

"Braun suffuses the village’s Old World charm with just enough shadow to enhance suspense, and Celia’s courage and determination make compelling reading. Readers of A Small Fortune will enjoy this further adventure..." — Booklist

Audrey Braun is the pen name of novelist Deborah Reed. She comes from a long line of storytellers and musicians and finds creative inspiration in the composition of alt-country, folk, homespun goods, and mysteries of the European kind (see Patricia Highsmith). Deborah is the author of the bestselling novel, Carry Yourself Back to Me, a Best Book of 2011 Amazon Editors' Pick. Deborah's work has appeared in The Center for Fiction's The Literarian, The Nervous Breakdown, Opium Magazine, More Magazine, and elsewhere. She has lived all over the United States and in Europe but currently resides in the Pacific Northwest where she is at work on a new literary novel. Find out more at her website: www.reed-braun.com

113 Crickets - Summer Issue

Nice company to keep

Book Review: Anthony Swofford's "Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails"

My review, in today's Sunday Oregonian. A clip:

If one is feeling generous, one will read "Hotels, Hospitals and Jails" and think, here is a man working out his demons. Those not feeling generous will agree Swofford is a wreck, while thinking that only the trading on his name -- he is the author of the 2003 Gulf War memoir "Jarhead" -- resulted in the publication of a memoir as scarily constructed as this one.

And about that publication: the book is published by Twelve, which puts out only twelve books a year. They are usually the cream, including books this year from Christopher Hitchens and Christopher Buckley. That Swofford's book was released as is is curious, and makes one want to know, beyond market forces, the reasons.

Breasts!

My review of the fabulous book Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History, by Florence Williams, in the Sunday Oregonian. The lede:

A friend came over last week. She brought her 7-month-old daughter, who is still nursing. While trying on my friend's dress, I took off my top and bra, causing the baby to say, "ghah!" and flex her chubby hands in the direction of my breasts. And I thought, look how smart these babies are; they know exactly what they need...

Read the rest here. 

 

In the Mood for a Good Time?

What do you have planned this weekend? Some LA sunshine, some sex, some frolicking with movie stars and maybe, offing them? No? Would you like to?

Download Shooting Stars now. It's free, until midnight.