ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

There was a book signing for Jennifer Haigh at Rainy Day Books tonight and my coworker friend invited me to go with her, since we have read and enjoyed both of her other books.  I was the unintentional cause for our interest in Jennifer Haigh.  When we were both doing a lot of travel in rural American towns for our previous job, I found a novel called Baker Towers on the bargain rack at Borders that was about Pennsylvania mining country in the mid-twentieth century.  This seemed like a promising theme, since I had been visiting a lot of decaying small towns that summer and it was one of my interests at the time.  I loaned it to my coworker friend and let her finish it first, since I was working on finishing something else at the time. It turned out to be very good as far as we both were concerned.  My coworker friend liked it so much that she bought Haigh’s first novel, Mrs. Kimble, and traded it to me for Baker Towers.  I think we both sort of felt Baker Towers was the better book.  She bought the newest novel tonight to get us both admission to the signing.  It is called The Condition, which at first made me think of conditional love, but which turned out to be in reference to a medical condition instead.  I can’t wait to read it and I may pick it up despite my current moratorium on unnecessary spending after the honeymoon (want to pay off my credit card instead of spending my money on crafts and entertainment).

Jennifer Haigh turned out to be an interesting person with a wide, expressive face that I felt seemed right for her.  While she talked, I studied her picture on the back of Mrs. Kimble and tried to decide if she was like I had expected.  She was better than I expected.  She read a couple of selections from her new novel, and then women from the group began asking a lot of questions about Mrs. Kimble, which I took must mean it is very popular.  I wanted badly to ask a question about Baker Towers, namely, what specific aspects of her upbringing or life prompted her to write it, but because groups like that always make me nervous, I have trouble thinking of how to make my question into an actual sentence that will sound like a human being put it together.  It is the same reason I never try to call in to radio shows anymore.  I always think of good points to call in about, but I can’t be trusted to remember how to speak English once I actually get on the air and have to talk to the host.

Thankfully, my coworker friend asked the same question I had been agonizing over for the last ten minutes and it turned out all right.  They had a drawing and a lady at the signing won a book she already had, so the store owner let her choose a different book.  She picked The Story of a Marriage, which Haigh read recently and recommended, as long as you can make it through the first chapter anyway.  I saw a poster for the new David Sedaris book while I was there, and my coworker friend and I discussed how crowded the place would be for somebody like him.  He is very popular, especially with NPR listeners.  It was rather nice that Haigh has not become that famous yet, although I hope that one day she will.  The event only attracted about fifteen people and was rather intimate and cosy, which I liked.

I also learned that Jennifer Haigh is a true lover of punctuation, which I enjoyed because I am as well.  A lot of people asked tedious questions about her writing process, which I found much less interesting than hearing about the research process behind her characters.  Her books are very character driven and I consider her characters to be extremely well constructed, so it was a lot more worthwhile to hear about the kernels for various characters than it was to hear about what she does right away when she wakes up.  I don’t know why people care so much about that frankly, but she answered their questions nicely anyway.  What I did find interesting about her process is that she said she more or less writes a novel the same way she reads one, and for similar reasons, which are that she starts somewhere, doesn’t know where it will lead, and follows the story thread until she finds out.  The writing process stays interesting for the same reason, which is that if you don’t entirely know how it is going to work out, there is significantly more incentive to keep going.

I liked hearing from a published author that this was a valid approach to writing, since I have always thought that I would like to write professionally, but haven’t ever liked writing outlines or setting things down before I really write the meat of something.  I don’t even like to outline research papers.  I just sit down with my notes and write them all at once.  When I blog, I never really know where the post will take me.  I just have a seed idea that I begin with, and sometimes I even discard the original topic because I find something more interesting to say as I follow it to its conclusion.  But I never really thought this process could be applicable to serious writing.  It makes me want to try.  There’s a good chance I’ll never go anywhere with it, but still, good to know.

Although we live respectively south and north of the book store, my coworker friend and I both live west of it, and we left at the same time so we were both driving west on Shawnee Mission Parkway at the same time.  And because she would have to go south, she was in the left lane, and because I would have to go north, I was in the right lane.  It was raining heavily and traffic in the two lanes was uneven, so every couple of minutes we would be driving nearly alongside each other.  This made me uncomfortable, because as soon as I got in the car I turned on the radio and heard “I Wanna Be Your Lover”, which is one of my favorite Prince songs and I always have an unstoppable need to sing to it when I hear it.  But because it is sung in a ridiculous falsetto and has extremely embarrassing lyrics, it is impossible to sing that song without looking and sounding incredibly stupid.  Also, it involves facial contortion. So it was extremely embarrassing that every so often my coworker friend would be driving next to me and possibly might notice and wonder if I was having a seizure or what.

So whenever this would happen, I would prop my elbow on the bottom of the window and act like I was leaning against my arm, but really I was only doing this so that I could use my hand to disguise the fact that I wanna be the only one who makes you come…RUNNING!

I don’t think I would have been as humiliated if it had been “Purple Rain”.  But that’s the kind of luck I have.