Go home to discover your memoir

In May I had the great pleasure to guest teach Joanne Glenn’s class on “Writing Memoir” at the Vienna Community Center in Virginia. I was hoping more of her students would contribute to this blog post, but two extraordinary women did. I made this offer to everyone in the class: Do this writing experiment (I guided them through it as a guided imagery free write—and they did love it!) and I will post on my blog 100 words of whatever you write.

The experiment you’ll see in a moment, but first I must tell you about another extraordinary event in my life that occurred simultaneously with Joann’s invitation and my visit. I grew up on Grantley Road in Baltimore. As I say in my memoir (Re)Making Love, 

“I grew up in a Baltimore row house with stairs to the second floor and stairs to the basement and a view from the front door to the back door and the clothes tree outside the door. My childhood house didn’t have hallways or a foyer. There was no place to hide anything or to hide. I could hear the neighbors when they argued and everything that everyone said inside my narrow house was fair game for anyone in the back, the front, up or down the stairs.”

Across the street lived Maxine Kahn, who (or should that be "whom"? Do we care?) you will meet today. I had not seen or heard from her since she moved away when we were both fifteen years old, and we were best, best friends: never-ending hours of Canasta gave proof to our love of cards—I went on to Bridge that nobody seems to play anymore—and to our ability to be with each other. She was my safe harbor when I was a child. Recently for some reason she decided to “google” me, found my website and me, and we’ve been corresponding ever since. And it turns out, that Maxine dabbles in poetry. Well, that’s what she calls it. I guess we’ll see about that.

What I am about to prove to you is that if you want to write a memoir, go home first. Here’s how you do it.

Here’s how Achamma Chandersekaran did it, first with my comments and then with her rewrite:

A Happy Home Full of Life

 We were the ‘singing family’-- My father and his 8 children. 

The scene I remember most is of us getting together to sing.  My father sat in his special chair with his favorite violin.   My brother, Joe, stood near a table as he didn’t like sitting down to play the violin.  My second brother, Thankan, had his flute and the youngest one, Marcel, sat on the floor to play the harmonium.  My sisters and I were the vocalists.   Oh, did we have fun! All the neighbors knew that we were all home for the holidays. 

Achamma,

This piece is very close to being. I struck through only one sentence. The reason is that the reader knows this. You need not state what you have proven through the details.

Now as to those details. They are marvelous, particularly the way Joe gets identified as not wanting to sit. We see where everyone is. I have a sense that it might help to “see” the father’s chair. Here’s why: Take your suitcase, as I like to say, and turn it into a painting. You’ve unpacked. Now look at what you’ve got as if it’s a canvas that you’ve begun. Take your writer’s brush and paint in again and again the details, all the concrete, small observations that make story live. The story is in the details.

But I am happy to publish this on my blog as is. Let me know about the strike through—something I think you should do—or if you want to add anything. I would title the piece simply “Singing,” for the same reason I give you for the strike through, but again this is your choice.

Here is Achamma’s rewrite:

Singing

We were the ‘singing family’-- My father and his 8 children. 

We were a unique family in the village and we did the singing as a family.  Girls singing in church was very unusual during those days. My father was the choir master and one of the very few in the village who could play a musical instrument.  One by one, as we grew up, we all joined the choir. Singing in the church got us into singing for any function that took place in the village. So the word ‘family’ is special to me.

The scene I remember most is of us getting together to sing. My father sat in his special chair with his favorite violin. My brother, Joe, stood near a table as he didn’t like sitting down to play the violin. My second brother, Thankan, had his flute and the youngest one, Marcel, sat on the floor to play the harmonium.  My sisters and I were the vocalists

All the neighbors knew that we were all home for the holidays. 

And here is how Evelyn Caballero did it:

Married to Market and Cooking

Mommy cooked every meal and always served Daddy first at the family table.  She went to market weekly buying fresh fruit, vegetables and fish for his favorite dishes.  She continued this habit after we left home, even when he at 89 became terminally ill.

No one knew he would leave us that late afternoon in May of 2010.  Mommy served him breakfast.  That evening she repeatedly said , “I greeted him then I went to the kitchen to cook his breakfast…”

She never went to market and rarely cooked after Daddy died.  Daddy and Mommy were married 65 years.

Here is Evelyn’s piece with my edits:

Mommy cooked every meal and always served Daddy first at the family table. They were married 65 years.[I moved this up because it is basic info the reader needs quickly so that she knows how long Mommy did this.] She went to market weekly buying fresh fruit, vegetables and fish for his favorite dishes.  She continued this habit after we left home, even when he at 89 became terminally ill.

No one knew he would leave us that late afternoon in May of 2010.  Mommy served him breakfast.  That evening she repeatedly said , “I greeted him then I went to the kitchen to cook his breakfast… .”

After he died, she stopped going to market. She didn’t cook. cooked after Daddy died.  Daddy and Mommy were married 65 years. 

All the changes here are to give punch to the ending and an echo to the opening line. The key metaphor here is cooking. Even though “rarely” cooked is more accurate, the writer can choose the stronger, more emphatic choice. In essence—meaning, sure she had to eat, but “cooking” was gone with your father—I suspect my phrase is pretty accurate. If not, don’t use it.

And here is Maxine Kahn’s poem. She didn’t do the free write, but she did go home to find her poem:

 Summer Nights in Baltimore

I remember summer nights in Baltimore

We were ten back then in 1956

Boys in crew-cuts

And girls in swinging pony tails and short summer dos

From early light til dark

We ran up and down hot city streets and sidewalks

Escaping the heat on cool, wet summer lawns

We jumped and twirled

In and out of rotating sprinklers

And small round plastic pools

That dotted backyard lawns

Innocent and joyous

We lept about in shorts and skimpy shirts

Arms and legs poking out, lean

Brown as chestnuts

From long hours spent under the sun

We ran in packs then, into the twilight – til dark

Our feet snug in nifty blue Keds, and white PF Flyers

Carrying empty mayonnaise jars

With holes punched into their lids

Air vents for our future captives – lightning bugs

Like shooting stars – elusive

Speeding by in the night sky

Lightning bugs -

Our nighttime summer companions – our prey
Flashing on and off like Christmas lights

Disappearing and reappearing in a blink

As if playing hide-and-seek with us

Trying to outwit us

But for the glory of the hunt

We persist

Our voices rising into the night sky

One after another, claiming victory in the chase

“I see one, over there….no,  there its goes…it’s over there….I got it”

“And there’s another…..I got that one.”

Shouts my next-door neighbor,  Ronnie Aaronson

As he quickly snatches a set of lit wings

Out of the dark, and into a small fist 

Pulsing with warm yellow light

And carefully transfers each glowing catch

Into a jar

Then another and another, again and again

Two, three, four …

All blinking on and off

A light show behind glass walls

We are mesmerized by the sight of it

These flaming jeweled wings

Warming and lighting their temporary glass homes

We come together to compare, to see

Who has the best catch of the night

We huddle closer

To view the accumulated light from our jars

Now reflected onto our faces

Distant voices edge into our circle of excitement

It is our parents, perched above the street

Observing from railed cement porches

Connected to

The long stretch of red brick row houses

That lined our beloved Grantley Road

Our parents,

Sitting and rocking back and forth

On squeaky metal gliders

Sipping cool summer drinks

Calling our names out

Across lawns and into the streets

Waving us home for the night

We resist the calls

Wanting to stay in our huddle of friendship

But, as darkness falls, we give up our night chase

And head home

Our precious cargo in hand, lighting the way

More on Maxine and home and memoir in an upcoming post.

Welcome lovers of CMash Loves to Read!

Visitors and Friends,

The lovely Cheryl of CMash Loves to Read has featured me today, this Sunday, May 29, 2011, in her "Shining Star" feature. Cheryl is a book blogger and she reads hundreds of books and chooses the ones she loves. I am deeply honored to be on this lovely site with so many followers.

Thank you, Cheryl. I am calling her today "the angel on my shoulder," as she has discovered me and my memoir (Re)Making Love: a sex after sixty story.


And get this, friends, new and old alike, I will be her featured author on June 20, 2011. So check back again for more.

Here, Cheryl, for you, is one my flowers:

Manhattan Photo Shoot: Would it be a go????

The photo shoot was magical. We loved Lauren Epstein (Real Simple editor), Casey Tierney (Real Simple editor), Glenn Glasser (photographer), Melissa Silver (make-up: boy, does she know what to do with a face that’s seen some time), Ben Thigpen (hair; such care such tenderness with all this white hair), Maria Stefania (wardrobe though I ended up wearing all my own clothes—she taught me how to wear them). The music played, we played, we loved and the camera disappeared.

Not it: Boffi Italian designer loft: but you get the idea

But even after the photo shoot in the Soho loft on Hudson Street at Time Inc.’s studio , Stephanie Booth continues to question for the Real Simple article. Was it ever going to be a go? Was my memoir (Re)Making Love standing in the way? The heart of our story lies there.

Compare how much she and the mag knew about us to what they finally chose to use: curious process that shows how vetted we were, how thorough they were, and how much we learned by talking about our story—stuff that’s in the memoir and stuff that’s not.

Here’s another glimpse:

More Qs???

Q: What details can you share about Del surprising you in Paris? Can

you describe the building your apartment was in? What were you doing

when you saw him at the window? Did you think, at first, that your

mind was playing tricks on you? What were you wearing? What time of

day was it? Any details would be great!

The view from my window

A: The apartment was 125 sq. feet on 7 rue des Francs Bourgeois in Marais, a four-story walk-up and I was on the top floor. I was in my nightgown, having breakfast when he called my cell. It was about 7 a.m. I answered the phone and he said he was outside. The door to the building required an access code and I gave it to him, but didn’t tell him which apartment I was in. (BTW, he said before I left that he needed my address in case of emergency: we have children, etc.—so I gave it to him.) The building had a courtyard that I could see from my window. I asked him what he was doing here, and he said he’d come to Paris to see me. I didn’t know what to do, but I told him there wasn’t room for him. He said, “That’s okay. I can get a hotel. Could I come up for a minute?” I said, “There’s a lot of steps.”

Q: You said when you and Del began dating again, he began talking to

you about his feelings. Can you give an example?

A: He said, “Mary, I’ve needed to lean how to love with emotional intimacy. To me, when I think about it, love has always meant care taking. You love with an open heart. I want to protect that heart and love that way.” I swooned. I wasn’t sure whether to trust. He said, “That’s true. So what you need is positive experience. Please come to dinner with me.”

Q: You gave many of your belongings/furniture to your daughter when

you moved. Did you have to go out and buy new things for your apartment, or did you just not have the space?

I simply had no space. My condo in DC is 1,000 sq. ft with virtually no storage. I didn’t buy anything because I had no place for anything. My daughter now has most all my mother’s crystal, much of my cooking equipment: tart pans, brioche pans, bread kneading bowls and forms, treasured collection of baskets, my mother’s dining room small table, an old desk and my kitchen chairs, the guest bed, our bureau—all now in Williamstown. My son, who lives in the West Village, took the bentwood rocker I had rocked him and my daughter in when they were infants.

Q: Was it coincidence you and Del bought condos three and a half

blocks away? Or was there a reason for that?  And where did you worry

you’d run into Del? (the corner bodega, the gym, on the street?)

A: It seemed odd to me. He bought his apartment after I bought mine. I did sometimes think he might just not let me go. But without knowing it, I had bought my apartment in the neighborhood where his office had just moved. I didn’t realize this because I saw my artist’s loft, loved it, bought it and moved to Missouri to teach. When I returned from Missouri, I realized he was three and a half blocks away—and was a bit horrified—we were negotiating a separation agreement, I was dating, and he might see me. So, I told him that.

Pretty, yeah, but also this is pretty much the whole flat.

He tells me now that outwardly he was buying a place near his job, but on a more subconscious level he knew he was moving closer to me. On my return, I did worry that I would see him on the street. And I was dating. He told me that once he saw me sitting outside at a café with a much younger man and that he was worried.

Revising life

In the process that has been the renovation of a marriage, the renovation of two lives—and the renovation of my apartment (more about that soon!) into two condos that became one: Yeah, I see the double entendre there—

I have come to understand two key things:

1.            That what I think I know, I don’t know.

2.            And that Paris is not on any map. It is in the heart.

Manhattan Photo Shoot: More on New Orleans and more Qs ?????

It’s a week before the shoot in Manhattan and the q’s continue while D. and I are desperately seeking a big easy. 

Buffa's where the locals play and eat Sunday brunch

Stephanie Booth, the author of the Real Simple article continues to press: stuff that’s not in the memoir (Re)Making Love, but stuff that hangs at sea without that story. Here’s another glimpse:

Stephanie’s interview with D. and stuff I never knew:

Q: Why did you feel you had missed out on “single living?” For instance, did you marry your first wife straight out of college?

D.: I really never had much single living. I got married the first time after my first year of college. I had a couple of years of single life when that marriage ended, and then Mary and I started our relationship. I thought I had missed out on single life – and largely I had – but I discovered through the separation that I had more importantly missed out on understanding myself, how I came to this point, what I could or should change, and what should not change. When we separated, I found that right from the start, I was not focusing on what you would list as the typical aspects of “single life.” I was intensely focused on a more personal discovery.

Q: When your lawyer kept reminding you the separation papers were ready to be signed, what excuse did you give for not doing so? (Or did you just not return phone calls/emails?)

D.: Actually, instead of just wrapping up the negotiations, Mary and I kept negotiating smaller and smaller details. They seemed important at the time. My lawyer and I talked a lot. He would do his job and advise me of what to negotiate and how to protect my interests. I would tell him that I was quite sure Mary and I would end up back together—if she did not find Mr. Wonderful in the meantime. That was my big risk. (Actually, that was more grist for discussion with my shrink than my lawyer.) Anyway, my lawyer said many times throughout the process, “This is the most unusual separation I’ve ever seen.”

Q: What details can you share about surprising Mary in Paris? What did you say when she opened the door? Did you have anything with you (or in your hand at the time?) What was the building like she was staying in? What time of day was it? (Any details would be great.)

D.: I took the overnight flight to Paris and landed at 6 a.m. in rainy, dark weather. By the time I got downtown, about 7 a.m., the rain had stopped and the sky started to lighten up. I found her apartment door – a typical, nondescript wooden door along one of those great Paris neighborhood streets of small old apartments and bright new shops. I rang for her, and she let me in. Pulling my suitcase, I walked down a short dark hallway that opened onto a small courtyard surrounded by the four floors of apartments. She appeared in a hallway window on the top floor, dressed all in white nightgown and robe. To me, she was shining. All I could do was smile up at her. I think I said something utterly romantic and charming, like “Uh, hello.”

Q: Were the problems in your marriage because of your anger? Or did the problems simply exacerbate your temper? (If the latter, can you describe?)

D.: My anger was a symptom. I spent a lot of time alone reading and talking with my therapist to get at the underlying issues. In the marriage, I might get upset at something external or at Mary, but it didn’t really matter which. She just had a hard time experiencing the anger. She’s a gentle person, and anger or incivility is very difficult for her. That was the problem the anger caused in our relationship. But the anger didn’t come from the relationship. It came from me, and the understanding had to come from me.

Q: Correct that you hadn’t tried therapy (separate or as a couple) before you and Mary separated?

Correct.

Q: Was the focus of your therapy anger management?

D.: No, not at all. I realized it was a symptom (I hadn’t always seen it that way) and was more interested in understanding the journey that got me to that point. As I got at the underlying issues, the anger sort of melted away.

Q: Can you give an example of how you keep your anger in check now? What's one thing that used to set you off, which no longer does? (Or not as much?)

D.: At first, I did do some conscious things, like get in the longest line at the supermarket and just chill, instead of fuming at how people could be so slow, especially when I was in a hurry. I always seemed to be in a hurry. But as I gained understanding through the therapy, I didn’t have to consciously do anything about the anger anymore. It just wasn’t there, right at the surface. These days, I enjoy the supermarket. Years ago, our daughter described my trips as “speed shopping.” Now, no one in my family wants to go there with me because I stroll the aisles and take too long.

This is the man I didn’t know I while wrote my own journey:

My journey and the memoir that chronicles it struggles with this question: How to keep the door open—or the window—when a marriage has broken: I answer with the word transom:

A transom is a strengthening cross bar set above a window or a door. I was looking for a crossbar to give me strength. A mullion is the vertical bar between the panes of glass. Do mullions and transoms form the pattern of a window, a window on what is next?

And when I looked out that window:

I saw a woman at a house by the sea, a loose white dress, and the breeze across her face. I saw a grassy plot where tea and wine and wind will begin the story.

One of the locals dances and then so do we!

And I find a big easy in New Orleans and in D.

Photo shoot in Manhattan????--but first New Orleans

While the Real Simple article and its editors were deciding whether to send the mag. to bed with me and the infamous D. in it, we took a trip to New Orleans. If you can believe it Real Simple was worried that I was some big-time writer with a new memoir (Re)Making Love—but they couldn’t find the book—as my publisher has his own ways of testing the e-book market—another story for another day. So while they were thinking—as in the adorable rom-com While You Were Sleeping—after all weddings are always on the mind of the rom-com and on mine—we hopped down to the big easy.

Even if you think you know where you’re going, you don’t know where you’ll end.

On the first night we heard Ellis Marsalis play at Snug Harbor and then began to visit the neighborhood joints—where the locals hang out. I adored Mona’s Café where D. said he’d had the best roast chicken with the exception of mine—and that one is actually Thomas Keller’s; see Chapter 10 of (Re)Making Love. To read an excerpt and get the recipe, go here.

Did you know that you can ask for a drink-to-go anywhere in New Orleans? Maybe that accounts for the way stuff started to happen and link. But I had to keep my wits about me because Real Simple’s Stephanie Booth was on her tenth interview with me. Lucky I had my iPad along and lucky that I stayed sober to answer her continuing q.s for the story that appeared in the February issue.

So, I am in bed drinking a café au lait laced with chicory when Stephanie and I have this exchange (D. and I were interviewed 20 times for the article, before and after the Manhattan photo shoot. They do their homework at Real Simple.):

Here’s an excerpt, most of which did not end up in the article:

Q: Del mentioned that a few months before he announced he wanted to

live alone, he felt he had a short fuse and complained all the time.

Can you think of an example?

A: He'd been that way for a long time.  He complained about other drivers, about slow people in long lines and he would yell at me about a knife put in the dishwasher with the point up.  He wasn't mad at me, but it sure seemed like it.

Q: After Del's announcement, did he leave right away? Or did you both

stay in the house that evening?

A: I moved to the guest room.  Later we switched: So he was in the guest room. 

Q: When you and Del were dating again, do you think you continued to

date other men as a way to keep your heart from being broken again? In

other words, you were keeping him at arm's length?

A: I didn't know what I was doing, but I couldn't fully trust Del. So dating helped. It was confusing. And I often told men, “I'm confused. Beware.” Not a great dating line but men saw a gauntlet dropped and went for it. 

Q: You mentioned your kids were wary, at first, of you and Del

reconciling. How did you explain your decision?

A: We're still explaining. We might be explaining for the rest of our lives. To paraphrase Don McLean, They're not getting it now. Perhaps they never will. 

I answer those questions and then we leave the Soniat House on Chartres Street near St. Mary’s Church, on a quiet edge of the French Quarter where the locals actually live —on the edge of the more-to-come. On Sundays, from the church horns instead of organ music overlay the street.

D. and I have come together—the memoir is written, the miracle of reunion has occurred, our apartment like our marriage is under renovation.

So love is on my mind. We walk to Jackson square and there’s the wedding complete with marching band at that famous church in Jackson square.

And then I get my palm read. Oh, why not? 

 

Much more to come about the interview and the photo shoot that did take place in Manhattan at the Time-Warner studio in a fab Soho loft! And more on the life change that New Orleans embodies. The city wraps you in its arms and takes over—that’s all there is to it. Give in.

New Post coming on the Real Simple interview process and New Orleans

Note to my readers: I'll be back soon with a brand new post on the Real Simple article, entitled "Toward a More Perfect Union," the interview process--and the miracle of New Orleans: How these connect is quite a story. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the Real Simple article--and if you want the WHOLE story get the memoir that saved my life here.

As I forge ahead like a little boat on the sea of your belief...

Interview by Louise Wise

My heartfelt thanks to Louise Wise for the interview that you can read in full here: Here's a glimpse:

(Re) Making Love: A Sex After Sixty Story
By
Mary L. Tabor

     Fresh, quirky and delightful, (Re)Making Love: A Sex After Sixty Story, is brutally honest while giving hope that passion doesn’t need to end after a certain age. Tabor takes the reader from Washington, DC to Missouri to Australia and eventually to Paris, a visit that offers a stunning surprise—one that changed the author’s life.

Mary L. Tabor had been married for twenty-one years when her husband announced to her, “I need to live alone.” Already grief stricken by the deaths of her mother, sister and then father, the news threw Tabor into a tailspin of impetuous acts, the good, the bad and the foolish.

In this deeply personal memoir, Tabor wholeheartedly shares her journey, all after age sixty, proving it’s never too late to find love—and oneself.

Readers will find hope in a story that gives new meaning to romantic comedy.

The American adult woman is featured in this debut collection of stories about love, adultery, marriage, passion, death, and family. There is a subtle humor here, and an innate wisdom about everyday life as women find solace in cooking, work, and chores. Tabor reveals the thoughts of her working professional women who stream into Washington, D.C., from the outer suburbs, the men they date or marry, and the attractive if harried commuters they meet. One woman fantasizes about the burglar who escaped with her deceased mother's jewelry.

In another story, the protagonist uncovers her husband's secret: his pocket mirror and concealer do not belong, as she had feared, to a mistress but rather are items he uses to hide his growing bald spot. Revealed here are the hidden layers of lives that seem predictable but never are. Reading Tabor's wry tales, one has the sense of entering the private lives of the women you see everyday on your way to work.

Mary L. Tabor’s short story collection The Woman Who Never Cooked won Mid-List Press’s First Series Award. An excerpt of her new memoir (Re)Making Love: a sex after sixty story is forthcoming in the poet Ravi Shankar’s eZine Drunken Boat: http://www.drunkenboat.com/
Her memoir can be found here: http://sexaftersixtybook.com/. Her fiction and essays have appeared recently in the anthology Electric Grace, Paycock Press, The Missouri Review, Chautauqua Literary Journal, Image, the Mid-American Review, River City, Chelsea, Hayden’s Ferry Review, American Literary Review. She has taught at The Smithsonian’s Campus-on-the-Mall, George Washington University and is a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow.

What age group is you book geared toward?


You’d think from the title and me that older women would be my audience, and indeed they are, but the surprise has been that young women and men of all ages respond to the book because I am interrogating myself about commitment and intimacy.

Into which genre would you say your book falls?
I’ve written a memoir that deals with separation: Woman gets dumped, craters, tries to figure out what happened and ends up figuring out herself.

What is your favourite scene in your book? Can we have a snippet?

Sure. Here’s Chapter 1 of my brand-new memoir (Re)Making Love: a sex after sixty story:

I Need to Live Alone

I love romantic comedies: weep over them, quote their dialogue without attribution in conversation as when I am with a man who says he wants to be friends with me, “You actually believe that men and women can be friends?”

When Harry Met Sally: Harry: “What I’m saying is—and this is not a come-on in any way, shape, or form—is that men and women can’t be friends, because the sex part always gets in the way.”

I collect music scores of Rom-Coms, buy the DVDs and watch them over and over again. Now sure, the appeal to me and others is this: girl meets boy and LOVE results, inexorable, indomitable, irrefutable, life-changing LOVE.

I was sixty years old when my husband—let’s refer to him as D.—dumped me—old story, I know. But wait, as the commercials for fancy French Fry cutters say.

I begin writing about my separation from D. on August 25, my parents’ anniversary. They were married fifty-four years. Can you believe it? I am alone and reading The New York Times in my condo where I live now. I find this: AP report, dateline: Chamonix, France (Isn’t that where Cary meets Audrey in Charade’s first scene? “Can’t he do something constructive like start an avalanche or something?” Reggie, played by Audrey Hepburn asks Silvie after young Jean Louis shoots her in the face with his water gun. Jean Louis shoots Peter, played by Cary Grant, as well.) The AP reports on an avalanche that “swept down a major summit in the French Alps before dawn on Sunday, leaving eight climbers missing and presumed dead along a trail often used to reach Mont Blanc . . . . One survivor, Marco Delfini, an Italian guide, said he saw ‘a wall of ice coming towards us, and then we were carried 200 meters.’ An injured survivor Nicholas Duquesnes, told Agence France-Presse, ‘There was absolutely no noise; it was very disturbing. We only had time to swerve to the right before being mowed down.’ ”

I had been married twenty-one years when D. announced, “I need to live alone.” Oh so Greta Garbo. There was absolutely no noise. I was sixty years old and had been chasing him around the bedroom—to no avail—for ten years. Bill Maher in a comedy routine on HBO not so long after he had been dumped by ABC only to arise again with Politically Incorrect, said in a joke about older women, “menopause.” Get it? Men A Pause. Yeah, I got it.

The French Fry Cutter salesman raises his voice on the commercial in my head: “But wait, there’s more”: I decide to date. I want a man who believes that men and women in love must be friends. But Harry is right that the sex part matters.

The hell with Bill Maher.

Find the rest of the interview with advice to writers, stuff about marketing and publishing at Louis Wise's blog: http://louisewise.blogspot.com/ along with other writers she has featured.

My heartfelt thanks to Louise for all the work she did here. Check her out and read the rest of the interview.