Hey look, it’s a contemporary author who has me waiting for her next novel. That doesn’t happen often.

I recently read Maggie’s Astonish Me, and while we wait for her next book, I thought I’d post my favorite parts of her first book, Seating Arrangements:

How had she, Biddy, managed to raise someone so exposed and defenseless, a charred moth, a turtle without a shell, exactly the kind of woman she most feared to be?

“Hey, I’m not a member of this Great Gastby reenactment society you all have going on. I just think it’s possible to trick yourself into feeling better by pretending you feel better.”

While Winn believed that worthwhile young men must be carefree, he also believed that worthwhile grown men must bear up under the burden of respectability. He puzzled over when exactly the music should be stopped and the drunks sent home and the crepe paper swept from the floors to make room for cribs and Labradors. Is it now? he wondered as he set down his drink and turned from a conversation with a beautiful girl to vomit into the swimming pool of his friend Tyson Baker. When he heard some months later that Tyson Baker had died during a game of pond hockey, dropping through the ice like a lead weight, he thought, Is it now?

Underneath her wedding dress Biddy wore a white garter belt and stockings that he found unbearably sexy but did not tell her so, not wanting to embarrass her by making a fuss and also incorrectly assuming she had a whole trousseau of lingerie that she would, without prompting, trot out over their first year. Silence over stockings — the first regret of his marriage.

She was so entirely the kind of person he should be married to that he loved her, in part, out of gratitude for her very appropriateness.

Spending so much time with the Van Meters was like returning to a cherished childhood home and discovering that either her memory had been wrong or time had taken its toll, and the place was not magical or special at all but ordinary, flawed — a revelation doubly offensive because it made a certain swath of past happiness seem cheap, the product of ignorance.

Dominique peeled the label from her beer while Dicky Jr. talked, her head angled toward him to suggest she was listening.

Vocabulary:

Aubusson rug – floor covering, usually of considerable size, handwoven at the villages of Aubusson and Felletin, in the département of Creuse in central France. Workshops were established in 1743 to manufacture pile carpets primarily for the nobility, to whom the Savonnerie court production was not available. Aubusson carpets were, however, also made for the royal residences.

gliss – In music, a glissando is a glide from one pitch to another. It is an Italianized musical term derived from the French glisser, to glide. In some contexts it is distinguished from the continuous portamento. Some colloquial equivalents are slide, sweep, bend, or ‘smear’.

The best parts of Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year by Anne Lamott:

Little by little I think I’m letting go of believing that I’m in charge, that I’m God’s assistant football coach. It’s so incredibly hard to let go of one’s passion for control. It seems like if you stop managing and controlling, everything will spin off into total pandemonium and it will be all your fault.

…there is always something to fix or do. It is so fucking excruciating just to be. Just to be still.

I have listened so attentively to the most boring, narcissistic men so that they would like me or need me. I’d sit there with my head cocked sweetly like the puppy on the RCA logo… It was like those men held me hostage. I’d think about chewing my arm off to get out of the trap so I could rush home and hang myself, but at the same time I’d need them to think well of me.

Orville, who raised an infant son fifteen years ago, says he remembers clearly how insane things get with an infant around. He said even with a mate, it’s like having a clock radio in your room that goes off erratically every few hours, always tuned to heavy metal.

On her infant son:

He’s so pretty that it’s sort of nuts. I’m sure he will be as gay as an Easter bonnet. My friend Larry gave him a naked Ken doll that Sam took a shine to one evening when my reading group met at Larry’s, and it’s totally Fire Island around here now. Sam licks and chews the naked Ken doll at every opportunity. I called Larry and said, “You’re trying to recruit my son,” and he said, “Look at it this way — in twenty years you won’t be losing a son, you’ll be gaining a son.”

No one ever tells you about the tedium. (A friend of mine says it’s because of the age difference.)

He has this beautiful hand gesture where, when he’s nursing, he reaches back with his free hand to touch and lightly pat the crown of his head, and it looks exactly like he’s checking to see if his bald spot is exposed.

From Esquire’s interview of Valerie Jarrett, Senior White House Advisor:

• If somebody’s trying to get you angry, the calmer you get, the angrier they’ll get.
• Just because you’re nervous doesn’t mean you have to look nervous. Nobody can look inside you. Project what you want to project.
• You can’t expect people to put your friendship on hold because you’re in a demanding job. Friends require investment. Like a garden, you have to water them. If you don’t, they dry up.
• You have to look at people in order to be able to read them.
• Anytime I was hesitant about taking a chance, my grandmother would say, “Valerie, put yourself in the path of lightning.

Maggie Shipstead is a friend, she came to one of our Mighty Summits. I know someone at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop probably already told you this Maggie, but hell you can write.

A few of my favorite parts of Astonish Me:

He kissed her once, just before he left for college. it had been the kind of kiss that asks for something enormous.

For the first time she can remember, she is not afraid of failing, and the relief feels like joy.

One of Jacob’s greatest fears was that his life will not appear intentional.

She fears the slow, corrosive trickle of reality into his adulation.

She feels his love grow less dense around her, like a fog lifting.

She prefers Elaine to remain fixed in her old life like an obsolete weather instrument gathering data no one ever sees.

He felt like a sparkling silver parachute had opened around him, delicate as the billow of a jellyfish.

“I hate the city in the summer,” she said. “It’s like living inside a dog’s mouth.”