Nancy Rommelmann

Journalist David Hochman has kindly asked me to be his guest tonight on Upod Academy's interview series.

Tonight's event: Finding Stories Only You Can Tell (And Sell): Getting Personal with Nancy Rommelmann, wherein we will talk about journalism and I will be asked questions. I am eagerly cribbing for you, so listen in tonight, May 23, from 7-9pm PST. Details on the Upod site.

photo by Virginia Lee Hunter, taken while we were working on a story about Slab City

I posted a new essay on Medium.com, Advice to a Young Freelancer. Sample Q & A:

How do you find your stories?

I sometimes find story ideas in the Metro section of the newspaper, one-inch items with headlines like, “Man Nails Girlfriend’s Fish to Floor.” The short-shrift given to these stories will spark my wondering, what is this about? Usually the story doesn’t make complete sense; I want to look more deeply. I wrote about mushroom foragers in Alaska after reading one line about them in Bon Appetit. The reference started an itch that I needed to scratch; the scratch bloomed to a topic, the topic to a pitch, the pitch to a story. Follow that itch.

I am loving Medium.com, and am grateful to Hillary Johnson for the invitation, and for her brilliant essays, and for the Dymaxicon collection she built on Medium, as captivating to me as the grand department stores of my New York City childhood, the ceilings so high, and everything gleaming, perfumes and gossamar scarves and brass elevators going up.

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.

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.

Our literary landscape is littered with the remains of writers whose careers as reporters, memoirists and even novelists have proven to be fabricated. Is it ever okay for a writer to tell a lie? We look into the question here.

About a decade after a woman gives birth to a girl, she begins to know exponentially and unequivocally less about fashion than her daughter. I’m not talking about (what are for me) the classics; I’ve got a DVF wrap dress, a half-dozen Betsey Johnsons, and at 30 paces can peg the best polyester hostess gown in Goodwill. I mean what’s going on now: When did acid-washed jeans become “sand-blasted,” and what’s up with all the denim, anyway? Is Lenny Kravitz to blame for oversize accessories? Are we on the 67th or 76th resurrection of the peasant blouse? How would I know? Like realizing I haven’t read the last Amis book when the next is being reviewed, at a certain point I simply stopped trying to keep apace. I chalk up my befuddlement, and my 12-year-old daughter’s concurrent awareness, to some shark-like sartorial survival gene that needs to keep moving if it’s to stay alive. While Tafv likes wearing my Emilio Pucci nightgowns (which I inherited from my mother), she’ll also shoot me looks of abject terror when I try on old outfits I think still work.

“No, Mama, you can’t!” she’ll shriek, tossing the blouse with the ruched sleeves back in the closet.

“But I wore that when I was pregnant with you . . .”

“Mama!”

Embarrassment factor for Tafv if I wear the blouse: 704. Luckily, I still understand humiliation. And so, while it may be true that I was stranded in the fashion undertow two years ago, I also unwittingly did something brilliant...

Read the rest on Medium.com

I was on eBay yesterday looking to buy, for an upcoming trip to Maui, a Lilly Pulitzer dress. I love her work and have been wearing it since I was a teenager and found a pretty little halter dress at a junky thrift shop in Vineyard Haven. It was the perfect summer dress, made of t-shirt cotton, no zipper, you just tied it at the neck and you were done, you didn't even need a bra because the way the seams were sewn took care of that. This was of course no accident. I wore the dress every summer for twenty years, until it disappeared, and now have just one Lilly piece, an A-line skirt with a sea turtle print, also perfect, also immensely flattering, which all her vintage pieces are. She understood: you want to get dressed, you want to look pretty (and be able to run in your clothes of you want to), and think about it no more. RIP, Lilly Pulitzer, and thank you.

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

 

My mother called in January and said, "I think I have a way to get you to come home." The way was to be her +1 at the NY Review of Books 50th Anniversary event at The Town Hall. I went, I wrote, the piece runs today in the Sunday Oregonian. A clip:

In we go; up we go, to the front row balcony. There are chandeliers overhead, velvet curtains drape the proscenium. The scene, I think, is as glamorous as the literary world gets, an idea buttressed as Steadicam operators cruise the aisles. (Martin Scorsese, I read the next day in The New York Times, is making a film about the Review.) I cruise, too, watching people in their 20s to 80s shed fur hats and greatcoats, and experience the frisson of knowing many are writers, perhaps exceptional and famous writers, yet here anonymous, knowing them as we do only by their work, rarely their faces.

Silvers takes the stage and explains how the Review was born. There was a newspaper strike in New York in 1963, and Silvers, then at Harper's magazine, felt he and others could put together a good book review to fill the gap. Using as its light Elizabeth Hardwick's essay, "The Decline of Book Reviewing" (in which she cites the "unaccountable sluggishness" of Times' reviews), they worked through the night in the empty Harper's offices.

"We had three weeks and no money to show what a book review might be," says Silvers, "we" being Review co-founders Jason and Barbara Epstein, and a dream team of writers, Gore Vidal and Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag and Adrienne Rich, Norman Mailer and William Styron and two dozen others contributing pieces and reviewing the season's books, "Naked Lunch" and "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," "The Fire Next Time" and "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" and "Seymour -- An Introduction," which reviewer Steven Marcus suggested might better be called, "Seymour -- A Disaster."

The whole piece is here. You cannot see online the splendid caricature of Joan Didion by David Levine, my late stepfather, a copy of which sits on my desk, and so I reproduce it below. Thanks mom xx

 

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.

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.

 

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.