Sharon Harrigan

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Book review (English version) of L’eau de rose by Christophe Carlier

L’Eau de Rose by Christophe Carlier. Published in French by Editions Phébus, Paris, January 2019.

L’Eau de Rose literally means rose water, a natural face cleanser. Metaphorically it means sentimental. A roman à rose is a romance novel. This play on words in the title hints at the double meanings to come.

L’Eau de Rose is a complex little book that allows easy entry but rewards long reflection. At first we think we know what it is: a braided narrative that goes back and forth between the story Sigrid, the narrator, is living and the story she is writing. The two sections are in two different genres. Sigrid’s story is told in the style of realistic literary fiction, with emphasis on character development and style; and the story of Priscilla, the romance novel heroine, is plot heavy, fast moving, with a big dose of fantasy.

At least that’s what we think at first. But as we read, we become more and more invested in the roman à rose strand. It begins to seem like the more plausible part of the braid. We wonder: Is Sigrid such a skillful writer that her characters seem real? Or does the writer give so much to her art that she sometimes loses the vitality in her life?

At first the two main characters seem familiar. There’s the romance novelist whose life does not resemble those of her characters at all. And the romance novel character, who seems to be nothing but “adorable” and “irresistible.” But, as in the best novels, nothing turns out to be what it seemed.

We think we know who Sigrid is. She’s one of those middle-aged women (“between two ages” is the author’s more elegant phrase) who are invisible. At first her invisibility is metaphorical. As an author, she speaks through her characters and disappears in them. As a woman long past her twenties, she is used to not being noticed. Everything changes, though, when she checks into a hotel on a Greek island to write. She becomes aware of a young woman whose gaze offers her “a silent invitation.” Who is this mysterious stranger, and why would someone so beautiful be drawn to Sigrid?

The woman’s name is Gertrude, Sigrid discovers during their first dinner. Gertrude dresses in black because she is mourning her late beloved aunt, who left her an inheritance sufficient to travel to places such as this far-flung island.

Halfway through the book, Sigrid disappears for an evening to spy on Gertrude, whom she has become obsessed with. She looks in the mirror and doesn’t see her reflection. The maids in the hall don’t see her, and neither does Gertrude, out on the beach. Thus Sigrid’s invisibility becomes literal. Or does it? The next day, word spreads that the poppy seeds in the breakfast bread can sometimes cause hallucinations.

This metaphor-turned-literal seems to ask, Can middle-aged women use their invisibility as an advantage? Can it give them power? The power to take people by surprise, to become something our culture does not expect them to be able to be?

The questions that drive the two interwoven plots—are Sigrid and Gertrude going to have sex and are Priscilla and her fiancé going to get married and live happily ever after—are answered in delightfully unexpected ways. Subplots involving other guests at the hotel (a magician, an opera singer, a burglar, and the devil, to name just a few) contribute to the book’s odd magical quality, as well as to its suspense.

I have been a fan of Christophe Carlier’s work since I read his first novel, l’Assassin  à la Pomme Verte, which won the Best First Novel Award in 2014.  Since then, Carlier has been prolific, publishing three more novels and one book of essays/criticism/homage, on the subject of the cartoonist Sempé. (My other reviews of his work can be found here and here and here.)

The link between Sempé’s work and Carlier’s is worth noting. They both share an economy of expression (Sempé can create an idiosyncratic portrait in just a few lines, and Carlier’s short books never waste a word). Their cartoons and novels seem simple at first, but are far from it. They also share the same spirit: of whimsy, curiosity, and innovation.

L’Eau de Rose is, in the end, a cleanser. It will cleanse you of your preconceptions. You’ll question your assumptions about literary genres, the erotic lure of middle-aged women, betrayal, loyalty, and the power of the imagination.

 

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Spring “Dynamite” Update

Dear Friends:

Many of you have asked for news about my memoir. I’m happy to report that five months out, Playing with Dynamite is going into its second printing. Thank you, thank you—for reading the book and sharing your responses with me and with others. Extra special kudos to those who wrote reviews on Goodreads or Amazon. I really appreciate your time and thoughtfulness. These reviews, apparently, make a much bigger difference than I ever knew. And if you haven’t written one yet but are willing to—huge thanks in advance!

If you don’t have a copy yet, there are lots of ways you can get one. Print and e-book versions are available through IndieBound,  Powells,  Barnes & Noble,  Truman State University Press,  Amazon, and elsewhere.

SPRING EVENTS

AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) Conference Panel, “Truer Words Were Never Spoken: On the Challenges of Writing About Family in Creative Nonfiction/Memoir,” March 10, 3:00-4:15 PM, Tampa, FL

We had a packed house, standing-room-only, people sitting on the floor in the aisles for this wonderful panel. Here’s a photo of me with my fellow panelists, the wonderful writers Artress Bethany White, Lori Horvitz, and Bridgett Davis.

The Virginia Festival of the Book starts next week. I’ll be reading with Mike Smith and Panthea Reid. The amazing Jay Varner will be the moderator. Here’s a link to the event:

Details: “The Hearts Lives On: Memoirs on Love, Grief, and Resilience,” March 23, 10:00-11:30 AM, CitySpace, Downtown Mall, Charlottesville, VA

AWARDS

Playing with Dynamite is a finalist for the May Sarton Book Award. The winner will be announced later this month.

I have been awarded a fellowship at the Virginia Center for the Arts in Auvillar, France this fall.

MEDIA ATTENTION

Reviews

LitReactor: “The nature of memory, the mythology we create around our parents, love, marriage, and motherhood—Sharon Harrigan’s Playing with Dynamite is about all of these things, but also so much more. . . . This is the kind of memoir that will increase your emotional IQ, making you smarter about your own life, and maybe even the familiar mystery of your own family.”

San Francisco Book Review: “I earnestly recommend this excellently crafted personal history.” (Five out of five stars.)

Shannon Fox’s Isle of Books: “Beautifully written, engrossing, and artfully structured, it reminded me a lot of The Glass Castle.”

 New Pages: “With renewed media interest these days in the concept of truth, now is the perfect time to read Playing with Dynamite.”

Midwest Book Review: “Playing with Dynamite: A Memoir is an extraordinary, exceptional, deftly crafted and multilayered account that will prove to be an enduringly popular addition to community and academic library Contemporary American Biography collections.”

Kirkus Reviews: “A warm, engaging read about the ways in which memory distorts our understanding of family.”

Interviews/Podcasts (with links)

Interview on LITerally Podcast

Interview in The Rumpus

Interview in Split Lip Magazine

Interview in Huffington Post

Interview in The Nervous Breakdown

Interview in Streetlight

Interview on Deborah Prum’s blog:

Interview on Caroline Leavitt’s blog:

Happy spring, happy reading!
With gratitude,
Sharon

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Letter to My Thirteen-Year-Old Self

dear sharon love sharon

In my first-year memoir class, we cover Bill Roorbach’s excellent craft book, Writing Life Stories, in a year. My favorite chapter is the one about voice. The first exercise is to write a letter to someone, a letter you won’t send. Roorbach says, “This exercise always produces the best writing of the term up to the time I assign it. . . . When we address a particular person . . . we know what’s vital and urgent. . . And all this knowing gives us a clear, confident authoritative voice.”

For our in-class writing assignment, I asked my class to all address the same person—their own younger self. The results were compelling. I had no idea when the fifteen-minute timer started on Thursday where I was going to go. Below are the results:

Sharon, tomorrow is your last day of seventh grade. You are thirteen. You’re not yet the mother of a thirteen year old. You to go Huff Junior High School in Lincoln Park, Michigan.

Your hair is too straight and too red and you have too many freckles. You don’t talk loudly enough, and you’re not as pretty as your sister or as smart as your brother. No, Sharon. Don’t think those thoughts. I know now they’re not true.

Not everyone has to have thick poufy hair like Charlie’s Angels. Straight will come back. Eighties style is the pits. Everything you are aspiring to look like will be laughable in a few decades.

But that’s not what I really want to tell you. I want you to know that your hair doesn’t matter. That you are smarter than you think. Your brother might have a photographic memory and be a whiz at foreign languages but you, you’re a poet. Sensitive. Perceptive. And you have emotional smarts. You don’t know yet how important this kind of intelligence will be.

You haven’t been kissed yet. You will be this summer, at your first overnight camp, one week in northern Michigan. Bible camp. The boy you’ll kiss will have even redder hair than you, if that’s possible. He’ll be tall and gangly and everyone will say what a perfect couple you are and you won’t care that the only thing you have in common is your red-hot hair.

He lives hours away from you, but you’ll exchange letters, and you’ll keep his letters under your pillow and cry a little after you read them for the four millionth time.

He’ll call one day, even though long distance is expensive, and you’ll stammer and he’ll stutter and you won’t be able to believe that after all those letters neither of you knows what to say. This exchange will come to represent for you, years later, what awkwardness is. This fumbling and stumbling will be what it means to be thirteen.

Dave. That’s his name. All your church friends will tease you about him. Your first “boyfriend,” though that seems like too important a word to call someone you never saw again. You can still feel how hard you tried to read the whole world into his letters.

My daughter is thirteen now. Tomorrow is her last day of seventh grade. When we walked the dog together, I told my daughter about Bible camp, but I didn’t mention Dave. I don’t know if my daughter has been kissed yet. Would she tell me? Did I tell my mom? Of course not.

This exercise helps teach us to be compassionate to that crazy person we used to be. Writing ourselves a letter also helps us understand how to use retrospective voice, the voice of the older (wiser?) writer, as opposed to the younger self on the page we’re writing about.

In my class we talked about the pros and cons of using present tense in memoir, and I weighed in on the con side, even though I used present tense myself in this exercise. It’s not that present tense isn’t effective, it’s that using it makes the writer’s job more difficult. Because when you insert your retrospective voice from the present, it’s got no other verb tense to use except the same one you’ve been using for the past. Which is one way I got tripped up in my exercise.

So, don’t do what I did! See how much trouble it got me in. Which is really the same thing I wish I could tell my thirteen-year-old self.

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Country Roads, Take Me Home

cherry blossom

It was the week Prince died. Music was on our minds, so I gave my class this writing prompt: Write about music you loved or music you hated. Let it take you back in time, in your head and on the page.

We did a three-minute meditation, then wrote, nonstop, for fifteen minutes. This was mine:

I don’t remember my mother singing me lullabies. But I know she did because I sing them to my own children. When my son, my first, was a colicky newborn, I’d often spend the whole night dozing on the rocking chair in his room, as I held him against my chest, to lull him to sleep. Sleep wouldn’t come to him unless he felt my heart beat next to his. And, perhaps more to entertain myself than him, I sang. I was too exhausted to think of song lyrics. I had to sing something I knew without thinking.

So I sang my mother’s lullabies. Daisy daisy, give me your answer do, I’m half crazy, all for the love of you. . . Swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home . . . Mama’s lil chillen love shortnin shortnin, Mam’s lil chillen love shortnin bread . . . Tur a lu ra lu ra, tur a la ra li, tu ra lu ra lu ra, hush now don’t you cry . . . And the one I remember best of all. The one that chokes me up even now (the one my daughter still asks for): I gave my love a cherry without a stone . . . The part that always gets to me is the last line: “The story of my love, dear, it has no end.” It’s a cliché. There’s nothing artful or original about that last line. But in my exhaustion I felt the endlessness of love, that when your body and brain are drained and you have nothing left, when it’s three in the morning and you’re still rocking in that chair, it feels like you must be doing it all for a reason and that reason must be the endlessness of love.

The music I do remember sharing with my mother evokes less sympathetic feelings. She listened to country radio, which felt, to me, like a glorification of two timing, heavy drinking, truck driving, foul mouthed rednecks. I’m not proud that I judged the music so harshly, so stupidly, back then. I was unsophisticated enough to fancy myself sophisticated, immature enough to think I was above all those twanging guitars and country roads take me home (I was moving to New York City! I knew where the real action was). I was no coal miner’s daughter, or at least I didn’t want to admit it. Only now, living so near bluegrass country, can I appreciate how much I missed out by dismissing my mother’s music. And, by extension, my mother.

 

 

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Writing Joy

briefs

In every memoir class I teach, we do a writing exercise. I used to find it difficult to write along with my students. I was too busy looking at the clock, planning what to say next. Or maybe I worried they would judge me. What, you’re the teacher and all you could come up with is that? But now I do the three-minute meditation and the fifteen-minute exercise, too. If they’re willing to be vulnerable and raw in front of others, shouldn’t I be?

At the last class, we discussed the “Writing the Body” chapter in Tristine Rainer’s Your Life as Story. I asked everyone to try to locate emotions and reactions in their bodies, to make their writing more visceral and immediate. We did an exercise called “free write a feeling.” The point is to reject clichés like “our eyes locked” or “I felt a bolt of electricity go through me” and find fresh imagery. We tried to imagine ourselves experiencing an emotion and noted what happened to our breath, our heartbeat, our muscles, our mouths—every part of our bodies.

I asked the class to name emotions, which I wrote on the whiteboard. We chose one and wrote it about without lifting our pens from the page. I chose “joy.” The bodily sensation that came to mind was “heat.” The image you can probably guess from the picture. This is what I came up with:

This is a scene I conjure again and again, as a way to calm down, but also to remind myself it’s the little moments that are the most exciting. James—my now-husband, then-boyfriend—is standing in the living room of his Brooklyn Heights apartment in front of his highly organized closet, in only his white briefs—the same kind he wears now, over a dozen years later. But it’s not the underwear I linger on. It’s not his strong pectorals, pumped up from swimming a mile every other day. It’s the expectation of what this dressing means: that we’re about to go on a date.

At this point we’ve been dating over a year, but every time, right before, he pauses in front of his closet, looks through his button-ups, and pulls on a “date shirt.” My two favorites are the violet striped cotton for winter and the deep purple linen for summer.

Just like my dog now knows when I pick up her harness and leash that she’s going for a walk, I know what putting on a date shirt means. Just as my dog starts jumping and nipping her tail, I can feel my body anticipating. My faces flushes, because pleasure, for me, registers as heat. A scalding bath or steaming cup of tea. A hot washcloth on my face. An embrace. Heat on skin, broiling in the sun. Soup opening my nose. Bubbling liquid coursing through my belly. A warm hand on my shoulder. The sun on my hair, baking blonde streaks into the red.

The shirt tucks into pants. Now no one can see what I just saw. But I can associate all the pleasure—food and drink, movie or music or dance, party or tete a tete—with this one image: the underpants. White. Empty. Blank. Ready. For what I know is about to happen.

Try this at home. Three minutes of silence, eyes closed. Fifteen minutes of riffing and not thinking too much. As Rainer says, “Let it be nonsense written at 90 mph. Embrace rubbish and absurdity in the attempt to find fresh imagery for your feelings.” Maybe you’ll locate fear in the back of your neck or anticipation deep inside your belly button. Once you do, you’ll be able to show those feelings, in a physical and vivid way, in your characters.