pam on it!

Monday, sep. 18, 2006   |   0 comments

By the way: Pam‘s reading was awesome. She is such a pleasure to watch! My fear of public speaking is so acute that I can even get tense watching someone else get up on a podium, but that is not at all the case with Pam. She banters with the crowd, and it’s all natural and relaxed, like she’s over at your house, having a scone or whatever. And then the actual reading part of it is so good, with the timing and warmth and the different voices…remember when your mom would read to you, just one chapter before bed? The story would spring to life, you’d sigh and cuddle up into it, until all too soon it was over, and then you would pout and wheedle for more. Like that, only Pam’s not at all mommy. Three-and-a-half-inch pumps, peeking out from beneath dream-fitted nightclub jeans? The leg kicking and swinging flirtily from Pam’s sexy side-saddle perch on the corner of that desk? Bedtime mommy never wore shoes like that.

Even Pam’s Q & A was fun/ny, and the Q & A is usually my least favorite part of any reading — that ten heavy seconds of uncomfortable silence followed by a too-too-long session of IDRHAQBLHPMBI & A (where IDRHAQBLHPMBI = I Don’t Really Have a Question, But Look How Pretty My Brain Is). I also was a huge fan of the Borders’ event coordinater: while we were lingering in the bookstore, waiting for Pam to finish up signing books so we could go across the street and drink just a shade too much champagne at the Starlight Lounge, the woman told me that she’d recently attended her twentieth high school reunion, and she’d brought along her old yearbook and actually confronted individuals on the broken promises of their signatures — “You said we’d be ‘friends forever’ … well?” So good. And then she gave me a spirited reenactment of the growling, palsied salute of her high school Grizzlies (like a Hitler heil but with the hand deformed into a menacing claw). Yes it was a fine, fine night, and I was so incredibly happy to be there!

Later, riding home on BART (and feeling maybe half a drink beyond “rosy”), I started reading Pam’s book. It’s hard to read when you’re drunk, on a train, but I fought the good fight and made it all the way to page five. When we got home I immediately tipsied into bed, but the very first thing I did the next morning: I got up, poured myself a gigantic coffee, and then got right back into bed and started in with the reading. And I didn’t get out of bed all day, just lay there and gorged myself on words. It’s that kind of book! The kind where you’re reading fast because you want to find out what happens, even though you dread actually finishing the book because you’re enjoying the feeling of living inside it so much. You know? Maybe this excerpt of a gush I sent to Pam explains me better:

“At one point, after I’d been in bed reading for three hours, Marco came in and asked me how it was going, and I said, “this book is GOOD and I’m jealous, of both the writing and of the characters themselves.” And that’s REALLY all I’m trying to say here, far more than all the little things you got so right along the way, you also somehow managed to create a story that gave me that feeling, whatever it is, that “nostalgia for the now” thing, which is so hard to describe, and yet: I get it when I read some of madeleine l’engle’s young adult stuff, the ones with the awesome, sprawling, complicated family, did you read those? Also, in a different way, when I watch the Royal Tenenbaums. You don’t want it to end because it’s a good movie, but also because you actually, on some loamy level, want to BE in that crazy loving, hating family as long as humanly possible? So there’s that, too, that small taste of envy mixed in there. Even though it’s hard and sad and scary — that new love that you’re writing about is — you still feel nostalgia for it, that ache-ness of love, and that nostalgia actually begins to feel like a small echo of that ache, in a small, grey, rainy day, sigh-y sort of way? Anyway. It’s a complicated thing, and it leaves you feeling kind of stoned and sad but also satisfied and wishing someone would just bring you a plate of cookies.”

Don’t you think you should buy Pam’s book, too?