Winter In July: "Christmas at the Women's Hotel" galleys are here

Lily, Grace and I are in what I trust are the final settling-in stages of what I need to believe is the final move of our lives. We have moved five times in the last year and I do not recommend it. I cannot and must not move another time. It just can’t happen again.

The Rocco Report: He can now say “big,” which means he wants one of us to read from Keith Haring’s Big book. I should say he can say most of the word “big”; he can say “bih.” When too much time has passed after announcing he wants someone to read Big to him, he will repeat it emphatically: “Bihhhhhhh.”

He can also say “mana,” meaning banana, where last month “minaminamana” meant banana. He can say Rocco (“Acka”), the usual Mama-Dada-Gogo axis (where “Mama” means anything he wants to be brought to him, “Dada” means me-with-prompting, and Gogo means anything he sees at a distance.

The Bon-Bon and Gogo report: We have finally unpacked their dog stairs, so they can get up and down from the bed at will, and they want for nothing.

Miscellaneous: We have furniture. We have internet. The first CNA program was cancelled the day before orientation; the second CNA program I managed to find as a replacement fell apart; but the third replacement CNA program seems to be holding steady and there is a very real chance I will get a chance to use those scrubs in the near future. Please do keep your fingers crossed for me!

The reading report: Now that I’m within closing distance of the Aubrey-Maturin series (just starting in on book #18 of 20, The Yellow Admiral) I’ve started eyeing Larry McMurtry. I’ve never read anything of his before, but I’m about two-thirds of the way through The Last Kind Words Saloon. McMurtry enthusiasts have assured me that this is in no way his best work, but I rather like it and think I’ll pick up Horseman, Pass By next. I’ve recently finished (and enjoyed) Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, which gets mentioned in most of my favorite 19th-century novels, am in the process of reading (and disliking) Thurber and White’s Is Sex Necessary? but will see it through. I’ve never liked Thurber, and this is confirming all of my priors.

I keep trying to finish The Stammering Century, which is terrific and has an introduction that feels like it must have inspired the same section of Women’s Hotel, even though I only saw it after the book came out (emphasis mine):

This book is not a record of the major events in Ameri­can history during the nineteenth century. It is concerned with minor movements, with the cults and manias of that period. Its personages are fanatics, and radicals, and mountebanks. Its intention is to connect these secondary movements and figures with the primary forces of the century, and to supply a background in American history for the Prohibitionists and the Pente­costalists; the diet-faddists and the dealers in mail-order Personality; the play censors and the Fundamen­talists; the free-lovers and eugenists; the cranks and possibly the saints. Sects, cults, manias, movements, fads, religious excitements, and the relation of each of these to the others and to the orderly progress of America are the subject…I came gradually to want to prove nothing.

The reason I keep trying to finish it is I’ve borrowed the book on Libby, and my hold keeps lapsing because a lot of other people want to read it too, so I’m only on chapter two. But I will prevail!

The Book report: I’ve sent off the manuscript for Meeting New People, formerly Gallstones, to my editor. It comes in at just a hair under 80K words, which is on the short side, but I have a feeling edits are going to be moderate-to-extensive and that number may very well go up. Too big to be ever be a slim novel of surprising force and urgency, but still too short for a sprawling, multigenerational epic, which is just about right for my present level of talent.

The galleys for Christmas at the Women’s Hotel have just arrived. (If you happen to live in the Bay Area and don’t have another book in your budget at present, email me and I’d be very happy to give you one of my author copies.) I’m quite pleased with them!

If you liked Women’s Hotel, it seems likely to me that you will like this book. If you liked Women’s Hotel, but found it a little meandering, you might find you a Christmas-themed episode more suitable. If you didn’t like Women’s Hotel, you probably won’t like this either, but at least it’s short.

I’ll post an excerpt past the paywall (but as always, if you’d like to read it without subscribing, just shoot me an email and I’ll forward you the excerpt for free).

Half the fun of this book came from choosing society names from old digitized copies of the New York’s Social Register. My sister and I became aware of the Social Register in high school, and developed a half-joking, half-aspiring attachment to it. The whole thing seemed so alien, so silly, so desirable, from our vantage point in suburban Chicago. Black and orange made no sense as a color scheme; “Dilatory Domiciles” seemed like bad grammar; the little strings of code that ran after each name was baffling. We did qualify for the Daughters of the American Revolution through our paternal grandmother, and some time after college I went as far as attending a few meetings and putting together my application, but between the D.A.R. and the Social Register there is yet a gulf to be crossed.