Month: April 2008

I read Augusten Burroughs’ RUNNING WITH SCISSORS last week. Or, should I say, I devoured it. Wickedly funny and intensely sad, this is a memoir that refuses to let you put it down. Anyone read it? Seen the movie? I’ve yet to see the movie, but now I want to. You know, so I can whine about how it fails in contrast.

I love funny writing, but the humor only carried me through the first half of the book. The “intensely sad” haunted me throughout the second half. Oh, the writing’s still funny in the second half, but the “intensely sad” lurks beneath, like a bog.

Then I visited AB’s website. Great site, by the way. While visiting the website, I found out that Mr. Burroughs’ new memoir, which focuses on his father, WOLF AT THE TABLE, comes out, like, tomorrow. Okay, so it might not seem “woo-woo” to you that I inadvertently read RUNNING days before WOLF’s release, but it did feel “woo-woo” to me. Then, linking from his site to a New York Times article, I learned that Augusten Burroughs changed his name. The article makes it sound like he actually changed his name and didn’t just take a pen name. But maybe I read it wrong. Still recovering from the Devil of all Head Colds.

At any rate, his birth surname is Robison. And his older brother with Asperger’s Syndrome described in RUNNING WITH SCISSORS is none other than John Elder Robison, who published his own memoir, about growing up with Asperger’s, in September 2007. It’s called LOOK ME IN THE EYE.

What’s my point, you ask? Just a bit more woo-woo. A (so far) unpublished (in novel form) writer I “know” (as in we’ve emailed each other privately every once in an indigo moon) from a Chick Lit writers listserv (that is now called Fiction That Sells, but that’s another story), named Kim Stagliano (gee, I hope someone out there can follow this sentence), just happens to be mother to three children with autism. Kim blogs about mothering kids with autism, she has an agent currently shopping a novel in which autism focuses hugely in the plot, and she contributes to The Huffington Post on the same subject. She knows and has met John Robison on several occasions. Now is there a weird sort of Six Degrees of Separation going on here? I know Kim. She knows John. John, I’m pretty sure, knows Augusten Burroughs. And Augusten Burroughs’ mother, as described in RUNNING WITH SCISSORS, reminds me a lot of Sylvia Plath (or, I should say, the Sylvia Plath I came to “know” through reading her published journals several years ago). I read Sylvia Plath’s THE BELL JAR when I was thirteen. That book belonged to Ma Mere, who recently returned from a winter in the sun, and one of the books she brought home for me to read was RUNNING WITH SCISSORS. A whole lot of co-inkidinks…a big bunch of woo-woo.

Do you have a literary woo-woo to share?

You know how the old TBR pile goes (To Be Read for the unitiated). You buy too many books, and some of them don’t get read for months – or even years. Or at least that’s how it is with my TBR pile. In fact, the more I’m looking forward to reading a book, sometimes, I’m sorry to say, the longer it sits in my TBR pile. It’s “gelling.” If it sits there six months, the reading experience is intensified. If I read it right away, the experience is never quite the same. Strange, I know, but it’s my M.O. and I’m clearly sticking with it. Which leads me to the subject of this post: Gemma Halliday’s SPYING IN HIGH HEELS. The first of four in a series featuring L.A. shoe designer and accidental sleuth, Maddie Springer, SPYING IN HIGH HEELS was published in 2006 – the year I bought it – however, true to form, I only recently read it. Last week, in fact. And I loved it. What a fantastic debut. Here’s the cover copy:

L.A. shoe designer, Maddie Springer, lives her life by three rules: Fashion. Fashion. Fashion. But when she stumbles upon the work of a brutal killer, her life takes an unexpected turn from Manolos to murder. And things only get worse when her boyfriend disappears – along with $20 million in embezzled funds – and her every move is suddenly under scrutiny by the LAPD’s sexiest cop. With the help of her post-menopausal bridezilla of a mother, a 300 pound psychic and one seriously oversexed best friend, Maddie finds herself stepping out of her stilettos and onto the trail of a murderer. But can she catch a killer before the killer catches up to her…

Okay, I take a bit of exception to the description of the “300 pound psychic.” I swear Gemma described the woman in the book as 200 pounds. Was I seeing things? At any rate, Gemma’s not responsible for the cover copy, but she is responsible for the entertaining story within. When I read SPYING IN HIGH HEELS, I’d totally forgotten that it earned Gemma a double-finalist slot in the RITAs last year – one nod for Best First Book and another for Best Mainstream Novel with Romantic Elements. Both well deserved.

So, yep, the second in the series, KILLER IN HIGH HEELS, is going on my next Amazon wish-list. This is where I confess that I don’t usually read beyond the first in a series if the remainder of the books in that series feature the same character’s point of view. I love reading trilogies, etc., that feature secondary characters from the first book (and are written in those secondary characters’ POVs). Because then the story itself and even the characterization is “new” to me. The problem with allowing my reading material to “gel” in the TBR pile is that by the time I get to the second or third in a series written in the same POV, I often already know from accidentally listening in on Internet conversations what’s happening with the love interest. This happened to me with Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series. I read ONE FOR THE MONEY and totally loved it. Bought the second in the series, expecting to love it as well. But the series was already up to Book 6 by the time I read ONE FOR THE MONEY, and I already knew that the heroine’s push-pull between two male characters was still occurring. Somehow knowing that took all the fun out of the reading for me. I’ve never been able to finish the second Stephanie Plum book, and I’ve never purchased another, I’m sorry to say.

So this is my warning, please no one breathe a word to me about the love interest and potential future love interests in the High Heels Mystery series – because I don’t want to know! I’ve discovered I need the “mystery.”

If you haven’t read SPYING IN HIGH HEELS yet, I urge you to get a copy. And, no, you can’t have mine. Support a well-deserving author and buy Gemma Halliday new. Any or all of her books. And tell her I sent you!