Omnivoracious

Maeve Binchy, Grand Storyteller and Irish National Treasure (1940-2012)

Carole Baron, Maeve Binchy's longtime editor and close friend, shares her fond memories.

Maeve Binchy died Monday night, with her beloved husband, Gordon, and her sister, Joan, at her side. She was 72 years old and left us too soon. Journalist, novelist, short story writer, and a born storyteller, she was also a generous friend.

I met Maeve at the Frankfurt Book Fair thirty years ago, on the eve of the publication of her first book, Light a Penny Candle. Viking had just sold the paperback rights to Dell, and I would be the proud publisher. We were both a long way from home, and I told her how I had read her book on a bus going from New York to the East End, sobbing, with everyone on the bus looking at me like I was nuts. In the way of many great storytellers, Maeve was still telling this story last year, but in her version, the driver stopped the bus and wanted to know if anything was wrong, and there was much sympathy from everyone around me as I cried that someone in the book died and they thought it was a friend of mine.

Since that first read, I have helped introduce her to her legions of American fans. For the publication of Circle of Friends (before it was a movie), I invited Maeve to come to the U.S. She was hurting from a hip problem, and she lectured me on VALUE, saying she couldn't possibly come to the U.S. if she couldn't tour, and we would be spending “all that money,” and she wouldn't be able to do all the things I would want her to do to promote the book. She couldn't give me “VALUE.” I explained that it was up to me to decide where the “value” would be, and I would take care of her. She kept her bargain, and I kept mine. She came to New York and held court in her hotel room, giving interviews as the pro she was. The book was her first New York Times bestseller.

Nora Ephron (1941 - 2012)

I loved Nora Ephron. I loved her long before she got sick, and long before I'd actually met her. Like many, many women my age, I wanted to be her, and everything from her essays (even the ones about having small breasts--not, I admit, my problem) to her seminal novel, Heartburn, did nothing to change that. I didn’t meet Nora until about 2006, when, at an event for her then-current book, I Feel Bad About My Neck, she threw her arms around me--me! Her eternal fan, whom I thought she had no reason to know--and said "You’re such a star. I'm so proud of you."

I had written to Nora Ephron, asking her to blurb my book, So Many Books, So Little Time. I had gotten her address from her longtime friend Joni Evans, who said, "What the hell? Let’s give it a try!" Ephron refused to blurb the book, but she did it in the nicest, most hilarious way. The letter she sent me--hand-written, to my home address, how she got that I don't know--was delightful, all about how she'd given up blurbing when her veterinarian threatened to kill her cat if she didn't blurb his book. (I assumed then, and now, that she--or he--was kidding.) I was ambitious enough to ask if I could use her funny letter as a quote. She said no.

More recently, I got to know Nora a very little bit through her sister Delia, whom I met at a book party under circumstances so weird I will save them for another time. Delia and Nora were close--they wrote You’ve Got Mail together, among other things, including the delightful, Love, Loss, and What I Wore--but Delia never traded on her relationships. But when Delia's book was published, it was Nora's house to which I went as a dinner companion and celebrant: say what you will about Nora's ambition, that night was all about her wonderful younger sister.

Over the last few years, I've been sent a number of writers from Nora. When Nora sent you somebody she thought was great, you listened. As I said to one of these women, who had been counseled by Nora to write the story of her unusual childhood: "I’ve learned a few things... One is that when Nora or Delia tells you to do something, you should do it." 

I always wanted to write a book like Heartburn. (Nora said to me, when I told her I wanted to write a book about MY divorce, but I didn’t think I had the distance to be mean enough, "It doesn’t have to be that mean, Sara. It just has to be funny!") Hell, I would have been happy writing one essay that had the verve and humor and style and honesty of anything in Scribble, Scribble or Crazy Salad.

Dear Nora. I hardly knew you. But you were everything to me, and to so many of us who dared to think that being a funny, observant woman could make us writers.

--Sara Nelson

Exclusive Video from Author Patricia Cornwell

We at Amazon had the pleasure of receiving this exclusive video from Patricia Cornwell, author of the popular Scarpetta series--which, as a body of work has won just about every award available to mystery/thriller writers, as well as being a cult favorite among fans. In anticipation of the latest Kay Scarpetta installment, Red Mist, Cornwell offers a meta-perspective of her character's psyche as she delves into the past to solve an old murder.

Why we picked them: #96 to #100.

Something about Best of the Year lists seems a little unfair. There are great books and brilliant authors all up and down the 2011 Amazon Best Books of the Year, and yet it’s always the Top 10, or maybe the Top 20, that gets the majority of the attention. Because we’re not all the same and (thankfully) don’t all share the same tastes, one person’s 98th-ranked book might be included in another’s Top 10. And vice versa. So, in honor of our differences, and to highlight the lower ranked but still great books farther down our Best of the Year list, I thought I might explain why we picked them, five at a time. I hope to work my way to the top five by the end of the year, but if I don’t it will be ok—the top books are going to get their share of attention anyway.

#100 – Delirium by Lauren Oliver

The 100th pick this year is a young adult book. There aren’t a lot of young adult books on the Top 100 list, so it’s good to see one get the last spot on BOTY. In this case, Delirium was a February Best Book of the Month, and in her review, Jessica Schein (the books team’s primary YA expert) described it as a “powerful and beautifully written novel.” The hook of the story—that in the near future love has been identified as a disease—immediately grabs hold of your imagination. The Amazon customer reviews echo this point, and a number of our editors loved the book as well. It’s one that readers of The Hunger Games might find appealing, a book that, in Schein’s words, “throws readers into a tightly controlled society where options don’t exist, and shows not only the lengths one will go for a chance at freedom, but also the true meaning of sacrifice.”

Author One-on-One: Jen Lancaster and Laurie Notaro

Jen Lancaster and Laurie Notaro are some of the funniest female writers around these days, and when we received this new author one-on-one between them I couldn't wait to share it with Omni readers. Lancaster has just veered off from memoirs to fiction with her new book about a couple renovating a house together, If You Were Here, which brings to mind that old Steve Martin movie, The Money Pit. Notaro returns in July with new laugh-out-loud tales of marriage and family in It Looked Different on the Model. Reading their chat made me love them even more-- they're like the self-deprecating best friends that never run out of hilarious things to say.

Lancaster: Before I get to questions, I have to take a step back and acknowledge how surreal it is to be doing a peer interview with you. When I was unemployed and looking desperately for a purpose in 2002, I ran across Idiot Girls. I loved your voice so much that it made me want to start writing, too, thinking, “Hey! I get drunk and fall down sometimes! I could tell those stories, too!” Flash forward nine years, and not only are we interviewing each other, but we’ve shared French fries with ranch dressing and you sent my dogs homemade chicken jerky. (Huge hit, by the way.) So I’d be remiss not to mention and thank you for your influence. That brings me to my first question – what or who motivated you to write your first book?

Books About Raising a Problem Kid

Outstanding contemporary American writer Anne Lamott's latest novel, Imperfect Birds--about a troubled teenage girl and the challenges her deceptions present to her parents--came out in paperback this week. Reminiscent of Lamott's earlier work and featuring the characters of Elizabeth and her daughter Rosie from Rosie and the subsequent Crooked Little Heart, Imperfect Birds paints a realistic picture of parents in denial about the extent of their daughter's drug addiction. Novels about challenging family dynamics and troubled teenagers resonate, and even though coming-of-age novels are common, Lamott's latest feels particularly vivid and timely. The more Elizabeth and her husband James punish and restrict Rosie, the worse her problem becomes.

Where is the road to redemption and how do these characters reverse the downward spiral? That's the answer readers look for because it's a consistent parenting question, and because of that universal concern that Lamott observes at the beginning of the book: "There are so many evils that pull on our children."

Here are a few other adult novels that deal with the challenges of having or being "the problem kid.":