0 comments

summer’s here

The first Memorial Day party we ever had was in 2008, when we were still living with the boys; I got back from New York and it was already happening, Q in the living room in his flip-flops, a water balloon in either hand.

“Are you okay?” he asked, slinging an arm around my shoulders. This was a day and a half after my parents announced they were splitting up, divorcing after twenty-five years together; I’d gone home to drink iced coffee in the yard in the suburbs, found a crater where my house used to be.

“Sure,” I lied, dropping my overnight bag and smiling. I took the water balloon he offered, hucked it out the window into the street.

*

Seven years later: we had five babies in the backyard on Saturday, climbing up and down the deck stairs, making funny faces, wearing baby hats while the rest of us ate potato salad and drank summer ale, our feet up on lawn chairs and the music probably loud enough to make our new neighbors wince. I didn’t know what the bushes were in my yard so P texted his mom pictures of them and ten seconds later we had our answer, hydrangeas, and instructions for how to keep them alive. “You’re here!” I kept saying all weekend, every time the bell rang, someone I loved on the other side of it. “It’s you, oh! You’re here!”

*

One year we made up a cocktail called the Cotuggie Noogie and made everybody drink it. One year we had a contest where everybody did the worm. One year the cops came, although to be honest that year is a tiny bit blurry. Two years we didn’t have a party at all.

*

The girls got a chocolate cake for my birthday. I told them all they didn’t need to sing. I closed my eyes and I blew out the candles. I wished it could always be like this.

We’re okay, or if we aren’t then we will be. We are all of us always okay.

0 comments

five good things

1. First order of business on my thirtieth birthday: stop being such a weird old goat about birthdays. I’m getting doughnuts for breakfast and wearing my favorite jeans and generally living my life this weekend as if I am in Beyonce’s XO video. Baby love me lights out, etc.

2. I didn’t do an RT wrap up here, which I meant to, but RT was amazing! I signed so many books and met so many amazing readers and wore a plastic crown and sold out of 99 DAYS and hung out with such rad ladies and also ate really good pancakes in bed while wearing a hotel robe. Two very enthusiastic thumbs up, would recommend to a friend.

3. The first draft of this book is so close to being finished, you guys. In fact, the only parts left to write are the parts I’ve been hard-core avoiding!

4. Tana French’s The Likeness (was this also a good thing last week? It might have been, I’m reading it really slow). I liked In The Woods because it filled the fucked-up partners hole left in my heart by SVU, and I like this one because it has a lot of other weird gross tropes I’m into. (Second order of business on my thirtieth birthday: stop pretending for one second that I don’t like all the weird gross stuff I like.)

5. My sister and her boyfriend and three of my best friends and one of my best friend’s BABIES are all coming to my house in the next twenty-four hours. I gotta go buy some trash cans+ flowers so that nobody knows we’re still basically living here like a couple of squatters. Then I gotta go buy some beer and put on a dress.

Happy long weekend. Happy, happy.

0 comments

things to do in Boston when you’re home for six weeks

Invite people over. Make enchiladas. Perfect your summer capsule. Watch hockey games. Read library books. Read cookbooks. Finish your book. Consider resurrecting your pop culture blog. Quit Game of Thrones. Learn to take naps. Rip the siding off your house. Assemble a bed. Come up with something approximating a routine. Listen to the Beach Boys. Make cocktails. Contemplate a piano. Curate your tumblr. Call your mom. Go see Pitch Perfect. Go see Mad Max. Buy fancy pajamas. Meet your neighbors. Sit outside.

0 comments

five good things

1. I perfected the art of the homemade iced coffee this week and it made me feel like one million dollars. Which is, incidentally, roughly the amount of money I spend on iced coffee in any given summer.

2. This article about One Direction that’s also about fandom and womanhood and aging and life and was one hundred percent the best thing I read this week. Seriously, do yourself the favor.

3. How happy my nerdy husband was when the Rangers won their series the other night. I said to him, now you know what it’s like when I’m waiting to see if the characters on my show are going to kiss in the season finale. 

4. Tiny new home things: a place to put house keys, enough leftovers in the fridge to make a frittata, an azalea bush on the front steps.

5. Am headed to Dallas at this very moment for RT (and, let’s be real, to drink beers with fellow Fourteeners Julie Murphy and Natalie Parker). Come say hi if you’re around!

0 comments

and leave no trail

 

In case it’s somehow not super-obvious yet: I’m not a gentle person. I slam doors. I drop things. I thump down the stairs like an elephant; I blurt stuff and then immediately regret it. I do not always understand or appreciate the impact of my own self in space.

It’s part of why I’m so clumsy, probably: “Think about your steps,” my dad told me once, after I’d wiped out in the middle of one sidewalk or another, bruises on my shins or the palms of my hands. “Just move more slowly, and think.”

I try to, I told him. I just forget. 

This weekend, I messed up. It doesn’t matter how, but I acted like a bull in a damn china shop, and with a carelessness that is sort of breathtaking to me when I remember it now, I broke a thing that, for various reasons, I can’t fix.

I didn’t think about my steps, and I fell.

I’ve been trying to figure out what I want to write about turning thirty. I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what I want to do. In the past I’ve made long lists of goals and plans and visions but this decade I think I just want to live in the world more carefully. I want to leave a little less destruction in my wake.

0 comments

five good things

1. My first full week at home since we moved into this house, during which time I completed important domestic tasks such as taking out the trash and paying the overdue cable bill as well as buying a dining room table like an adult, except not like an adult really because the real reason I did it was because the kitchen table was so covered in crap that it actually felt easier to BUY ANOTHER TABLE instead of cleaning it off. (It’s clean now, though. Really. I swear. Ish.)

2. Iced coffee season, which is happily also drinking Sam Summers on patios season, which is happily also flip-flop season, which is happily also the best season of the year.

3. It’s also time to put my summer capsule together, which meant I spent this week looking at jumpsuits on the J.Crew Factory website and feeling generally delighted as I imagined all the places I might wear them. I was talking to my friend Julie the other day about how I think the capsule–and capsule-type-thinking– has actually helped my anxiety in a lot of ways. There’s a blog post in me about this, probably. We’ll discuss.

4. Sarah Dessen’s Saint Anything, which came out this week and which I am really enjoying. Sarah Dessen was my YA gateway drug and it is always, always nice to visit with her, plus this book makes you want to eat pizza and listen to bluegrass music, both of which I intend to do later today.

5. I finished grad school this week on the heels of a bunch of scary professional decisions I frankly did not feel at all qualified to make and two weeks in advance of my 30th birthday. I don’t know, you guys. It feels like a new chapter. It feels really, really good.

Happy weekend. Love you.

, 0 comments

fight weekend

At nine thirty in Las Vegas I am about to die of exhaustion and bad hair but Maria says absolutely not, it is nine thirty in Las Vegas, go change your clothes, and twenty minutes later we are whizzing down the strip to the Bellagio, where she knows of a caviar bar she thinks we should try. Maria is the kind of person who knows things like that, who has friends in every city we visit, pulling stories like so many fancy dresses from the depths of her Mary Poppins bag.

“We’re on book tour,” we keep explaining to taxi drivers and front desk clerks, to bartenders at dimly-lit hotel restaurants. Next to us in Nashville is a wedding party doing one round of Jaegerbombs after another. “We write YA novels.”

In California the girls at Archbishop O’Dowd visit ask the best questions anyone has ever asked me; there’s a fire drill and we stand on the football field in the April sunshine talking about college, talking about the books they like to read. It makes me want to go teach high school. It makes me want to write about high school with a truer heart.

 

(It turns out I like caviar a lot; or, more accurately, I like toast points and food that is also an activity, and I happily assemble the world’s tiniest, most intricate late-night dinner, trying not to spill capers down my dress. Everyone else is here to see Mayweather and Pacquiao beat each other to smithereens, all the girls in stilettos and glitter. I hook the heels of my boots around the rungs of my barstool, take it in.)

We are tired and rather slaphappy; we make our own excellent time. At a Hilton in Tennessee I plug in the iron and an actual flame shoots out of the wall; when I tell her about it both of us double over cackling even though it isn’t actually all that funny, totally uncontrollable, geysering up. “I could hear laughing you all the way upstairs,” Susane reports. Susane’s fans are the kind who drive seven hours to see her and I am humbled by the gentleness of her heart, by her generosity. We get cupcakes for her birthday and have them delivered to the bookstore, all of us singing in the children’s section of the Barnes and Noble, making a wish.

In the morning there’s a 4:30 wake up call, still dark, the whole city shining out the window of the thirty-fourth floor. I drag my suitcase down to the lobby, watch the rest of the world trickling in.

, , 0 comments

on the road

image1

In June of 2002, when I was 17, I packed my bags with great enthusiasm for a teen tour to Australia with 41 of my classmates at my all-girls Catholic school. I brought all my cutest shorts and t-shirts, all my bathing suits and sundresses, a lovely polyester maxi skirt from Delia’s. I popped my platform J.Crew flip-flops onto my feet, walking carefully so as not to turn an ankle.

Then I got off the plane in Sydney and realized what I’d somehow failed to on my 22-hour sojourn across the ocean, or in all the days and weeks leading up to my trip:

summer in Westchester County means winter in Australia.

And that is the story of how I traveled the world wearing the same ratty pair of navy blue sweatpants for 14 days in a row.

I’ve traveled a lot since 2002, and I like to think I’ve gotten marginally better at packing my bags since then. So in honor of the Epic Reads Tour kicking off today, I thought I’d share 10 things I made sure to shove into my suitcase this time around.

Gold studs: for immediately feeling 30% more put together. I love these from Moulton.

Pistachios and dark choc: I’d like to tell you I’m a cool travel customer 100% of the time, but the truth is I go from zero to hangry like, scarily fast. It helps to have emergency snacks to shove into my piehole in case things start to get dire.

Dark jeans: make it harder for you to notice when I inevitably spill guacamole on them!

Wedge booties: I feel like I carry myself more like an adult when I’ve got a shoe with a heel on, but my tendency toward accidental self-harm is well-documented in this space. These seem to have a pretty good center of gravity, which is always a plus.

Leather jacket: for an extra shot of bravery.

Umbrella: because every time I don’t bring one I end up soaking wet in line at CVS behind a bunch of other soaking wet people also buying marked-up desperation umbrellas. Like a chump.

Blanket scarf: I forgot my blanket scarf when I went to LA and I legit almost cried in the airport like a small child. It’s a blanket! It’s a scarf! It’s a pillow! It’s a tent! It is a goddamn miracle, is what it is, and I have placed it right next to my front door so I don’t accidentally leave it this time.

Mom’s emergency pouch: I read once that if you carry an Advil, a band aid, and a tampon, people will always think you have your shit together even when all other evidence clearly indicates to the contrary.

More underwear and hair ties than I could ever possibly need: because I have never once in my life thought, damn, I really brought too many hair ties and pairs of underwear on this trip.

Nora Roberts audiobook: for emergency consumption in blanket tent, natch.

Hey Chicago-types, come see me tonight at 5pm at The Bookstall! I hear there’s gonna be pizza. And check out the rest of the Epic Reads events here. Can’t wait to meet you all!

 

0 comments

five good things

(New York minutes.)

1. Sitting on a sunny patio at Lavender Lake with my beautiful sister and her handsome boyfriend, drinking rose and feeling perfectly happy.

2. The moment two-thirds of the way through The King and I when Ken Watanabe puts his hand on Kelli O’Hara’s waist and they dance the shit out of it and it’s huge and joyful and weirdly sexy and all the old people at Lincoln Center clap and so do I.

3. Holding Baby Bea for the first time and how she’s tiny but not unpleasantly tiny and how her clothes are just fabulous, and also how one of my best friends, like, made her.

4. Reading the entirety of Rainbow Rowell’s Landline on various subway trips over the course of four days, on the way to breakfast with my mom and to the Alloy offices and Grand Central and my sister at school, all these magic snatches of love story in between.

5. I went to dinner with my husband and my editors on Tuesday, on the day my second book came out, after my event in New York City that was full of people I love. I don’t even know which part of that sentence is the most unbelievable part. Typing it out made me cry. I am so ferociously lucky. I am luckier than anyone should be.

Bonus number six, because this was a very good week: on the 5 train, when a man dressed all in white punched me really hard in the arm to get my attention, then stood up and gave me his seat. It was an absurd moment. I took the seat and said thanks.

0 comments

99 DAYS is out today!

I have so much to share with you guys, but in the meantime, if you’re in New York come say hi to me, Susane Colasanti, and Maria Dahvana Headley at Books of Wonder tonight at 6pm. Also heyyyy, here’s an excerpt from the book: 

***

Julia Donnelly eggs my house the first night I’m back in Star Lake, and that’s how I know everyone still remembers everything.

“Quite the welcome wagon,” my mom says, coming outside to stand on the lawn beside me and survey the runny yellow damage to her lopsided lilac Victorian. There are yolks smeared down all the windows. There are eggshells in the shrubs. Just past ten in the morning and it’s already starting to smell rotten, sulfurous and baking in the early summer sun. “They must have gone to Costco to get all those eggs.”

“Can you not?” My heart is pounding. I’d forgotten this, or tried to, what it was like before I ran away from here a year ago: Julia’s reign of holy terror, designed with ruthless precision to bring me to justice for all my various capital crimes. The bottoms of my feet are clammy inside my lace-up boots. I glance over my shoulder at the sleepy street beyond the long, windy driveway, half-expecting to see her cruising by in her family’s ancient Bronco, admiring her handiwork. “Where’s the hose?”

“Oh, leave it.” My mom, of course, is completely unbothered, the toss of her curly blonde head designed to let me know I’m overreacting. Nothing is a big deal when it comes to my mother: The President of the United States could egg her house, her house itself could burn down, and it would turn into not a big deal. It’s a good story, she used to say whenever I’d come to her with some little-kid unfairness to report, no recess or getting picked last for basketball. Remember this for later, Molly. It’ll make a good story someday. It never occurred to me to ask which one of us would be doing the telling. “I’ll call Alex to come clean it up this afternoon.”

“Are you kidding?” I say shrilly. My face feels red and blotchy and all I want to do is make myself as small as humanly possible–the size of a dust mote, the size of a speck–but there’s no way I’m letting my mom’s handyman spray a half-cooked omelet off the front of the house just because everyone in this town thinks I’m a slut and wants to remind me. “I said where’s the hose, Mom?”

“Watch the tone, please, Molly.” My mom shakes her head resolutely. Somewhere under the egg and the garden I can smell her, the lavender-sandalwood perfume she’s worn since I was a baby. She hasn’t changed at all since I left here: the silver rings on every one of her fingers, her tissue-thin black cardigan and her ripped jeans. When I was little I thought my mom was the most beautiful woman in the world. Whenever she’d go on tour, reading from her fat novels in bookstores in New York City and Chicago and LA, I used to lie on my stomach in the Donnellys’ living room and look at the author photos on the backs of all her books. “Don’t you blame me. I’m not the one who did this to you.”

I turn on her then, standing on the grass in this place I never wanted to come back to, not in a hundred million years. “Who would you like me to blame, then?” I demand. For a second I let myself remember it, the cold sick feeling of seeing the article in People for the first time in April of junior year, along with the grossest, juiciest scenes from the novel and a glossy picture of my mom leaning against her desk: Diana Barlow’s latest novel, Driftwood, was based on her daughter’s complicated relationship with two local boys. The knowing in my ribs and stomach and spine that now everyone else would know, too. “Who?”

For a second my mom looks completely exhausted, older than I ever think of her as being–glamorous or not, she was almost forty when she adopted me, is close to sixty now. Then she blinks and it’s gone. “Molly—“

“Look, don’t.” I hold up a hand to stop her, wanting so, so badly not to talk about it. To be anywhere other than here. Ninety-nine days between now and the first day of freshman orientation in Boston, I remind myself, trying to take a deep breath and not give in to the overwhelming urge to bolt for the nearest bus station as fast as my two legs can carry me—not as fast, admittedly, as they might have a year ago. Ninety-nine days, and I can leave for college and be done.

My mom stands in the yard and looks at me: She’s barefoot like always, dark nails and a tattoo of a rose on her ankle like a cross between Carole King and the first lady of a motorcycle gang. It’ll make a great story someday. She said that, she told me what was going to happen, so really there’s no earthly reason to still be so baffled after all this time that I told her the worst, most secret, most important thing in my life—

and she wrote a bestseller about it.

“The hose is in the shed,” she finally says.

“Thank you.” I swallow down the phlegmy thickness in my throat and head for the backyard, squirming against the sour, panicky sweat I can feel gathered at the base of my backbone. I wait until I’m hidden in the blue-gray shade of the house before I let myself cry.

 

***

Amazon * Barnes and Noble * Powell’s

«< 7 8 9 10 11 >»