First, I was given 2 free umbilical cord clamps (you know–that plastic doo-hickey) by a hospital clerk. Granted, this was after handing over $105 to have all my instruments sterilized, but still — one doesn’t need to be a novelist to read the clamps as a promise of the wonderful babies I’ll soon be helping to bring into this world.

Second, there was a two-for-one sale on organic peanut-butter at our grocery store. I mean: two-for-one, and organic! And peanut butter was on my shopping list! What are the chances?!

Third, Sima was ranked #1 on Amazon’s Jewish American fiction list. The list is updated hourly so I don’t expect I’ll be hanging around #1 for long, but look at my company – Amy Bloom, Elie Wiesel – I kind of wanted to photograph it for posterity.

And so it goes…I cheer for Sima from the sidelines, excited each time someone new reviews it on amazon or emails me about it; I run around collecting equipment and reviewing protocols and readying myself to begin work as a midwife on July 1st; and I hang around my home, reveling in time with the girls, in having the time to run errands or volunteer at Eva’s school or just plain play.

These are good days.

Oh, and here’s one more good thing (though I keep fretting about my hair):

Sima: The Book Trailer

No related posts.

Ah, yes, having talked a bit about each of the main characters over the course of the week, it’s time for the Sima’s Undergarments for Women, wine pairing menu.

To backtrack briefly:  while on tour for the hardcover release of Sima last winter, I found myself reading at a boutique wine shop in a wealthy suburb of Toronto.  The wine store ran a program: for something like $50, customers got a light dinner, a talk by an author, and 3 drinks matched to the reading. They even threw in a copy of the novel.

I thought: where has this been all my life?

We began with a champagne cocktail. “Because the novel is set in a lingerie shop, and lingerie is from France,” the sommelier explained.

Okay, I could buy this.

Read the whole post here.

Related posts:

1. Blogging for Penguin, day 2
2. The Penguin and I, day 3

As for Lev, Sima’s husband, the reaction is more consistent: for the most part, readers adore him.

Personally, I don’t always buy it. I mean, don’t get me wrong: of course I like Lev—I wrote him, after all. But their ardour has a protective, maternal consistency to it, and sometimes I wonder: you love him on paper, but wouldn’t he drive you just a little nuts in real life?

I often got asked how I came to write Sima and Lev’s marriage. At the opening of the novel we’re told they’ve been married 46 years. Readers wonder, fair enough, how I had the insight—some might say chutzpah—to write that kind of relationship given that I’m, well, young enough to be their daughter, with change to spare.

There were many, many aspects of the novel that developed as I wrote, the plot driven by where the characters forced it to go.

This wasn’t one of them.

Read the entire post here.

Related posts:

1. Penguin.com and me, BFF
2. Blogging for Penguin, day 2
3. The Penguin and I: The Final Post

By this point in Sima’s publishing career I’ve done lots and lots of readings: At independent book stores, cozy living-room book clubs, Jewish festivals, lingerie stores, and even, once, a wine shop.  (They served each guest 3 drinks, one for each of my main characters. If you follow the blog I’ll reveal the Sima’s Undergarments for Women wine pairings by the end of the week.)

Read the full post here.

Related posts:

1. The Penguin and I: The Final Post
2. Penguin.com and me
3. Penguin.com and me, BFF

Below is the beginning of today’s blog, with a link to the full-meal deal. More to follow, really this time, because they asked and I told them I’d do it and so set the alarm for 5:30am and, voila, it’s amazing what committed deadlines can do for productivity.

But I digress. Here we go. Hot off the proverbial press:

Hello out there—

I am so pleased to be blogging for Penguin this week. It feels a bit surreal: to set the scene, it is just before 6 am in Victoria, British Columbia, where I live, and my cat is circling my chair, meowing furiously, desperate to be on my lap.

Victoria is a small city on the southern tip of Vancouver Island—a peninsula on an island is how locals describe it. Basically, to get here you travel west across Canada: further, further, further still.

When you hit the Pacific Ocean, you keep going. And then here we are, an island about the size of New Jersey, most of it remote in a brown bear, cougar kind of way, and then some of it filled with really good coffee shops and 1950s ranch homes.

I think that sums it up.

All this is a long way from Boro Park, Brooklyn, where my novel, Sima’s Undergarments for Women, which will be released in paperback next week, is set.

Read the rest here.

Related posts:

1. The Penguin and I: The Final Post
2. Blogging for Penguin, day 2

Related posts:

1. Penguin.com and me
2. Paperback & paperwork
3. Blogs

A real book.

Actually, it started shortly after I posted about how I don’t read anymore because blah blah being a midwifery student is so busy. And I thought, really? Really really? Because I love reading. It defines me, or used to. And I thought, what about my daughters? If they don’t see me reading, what will make them readers?

So I picked up a book. It felt nice in my hands. And it was about NYC, and the Twin Towers, but not heavy-handed, just a story, a remember when kind of tale.

And then I was reading the book.  Let the Great World Spin, by Colin Mcann. It’s an amazing book. It’s smart and beautiful and heartbreaking, and it takes place in the 1970s, and okay, so I wasn’t born until 1975, but I swear I can remember the prostitutes under the Major Deegan just as he describes, they come to me suddenly, a small girl looking out the car window on a dark night and bright women under the bridge, waiting.

And: there’s a character named Tillie.

And then I idly turned to the acknowledgements at the back of the book, because of course I love reading the acknowledgments at the back of the book, and I saw there was a photo credit, so I turned to look for the photo, and it wasn’t there, and neither were 50-odd pages of my book.

Stopped me cold.

How could I keep reading knowing I’d hit a gap? I was lost. It was terrible.

I hadn’t figured my way to a solution –the chain bookstore downtown, get them to replace it, but when and with what receipt–when my wonderful in-laws showed-up. And by showed-up I mean came to town to take care of Eva & Tille while Jordan was away at a conference and I was on-call and please, could you come all the way from Ontario to help out, and, yes, they could.

And what should my mother-in-law be reading but Let the Great World Spin, and an intact version.

I’m all caught up now. Thank goodness, as it was Tillie herself whose voice was missing from my version.

Don’t let me forget to read fiction again, okay?

No related posts.

A friend of my former editor — my fabulous former editor, who is fabulous because she thinks of things like this even though Sima has a new home for paperback production — suggested that although Bette Midler has retired from movie-making (something about loving Las Vegas live?) she might have a “special interest” in playing Sima.

Playing Sima in Sima: The Movie, that is.

Or that should be, but isn’t quite yet, but really could be, don’t you think?

I have an agent’s address, but not a lot of hope that a letter from me will really be passed on.

But that’s where you come in.

Do you know Bette Midler? Someone who knows her? Someone who once tried not to smile too self-consciously while making small talk with her at the buffet table at their great-nephew’s bar mitzvah?

Or how about Olympia Dukakis? Patty Lupone? Meryl Streep? (Must always include Meryl Streep).

Everyone knows there aren’t thoughtful parts for older actresses. Here’s one.

(Though, looking at Bette Midler’s Las Vegas Package Vacation websites, I’m wondering if she wouldn’t actually make a better Timna…)

Anyway, give a holler if you know someone I should know, you know?

Meantime, on the midwifery front: client privacy is paramount, but when they go on the news about their hotel-birth I think I’m allowed to brag that, hey, I was there:

Victoria Hotel Birth

No related posts.

No related posts.

“If I could be any body part,” the Ob/Gyn told me, “I’d be a fimbria.”

I could see his point. And might agree, were it not for that dusty rose uterus, so smooth and neat and palm-able, all the more amazing to contemplate how it grows to grow a baby.

Imagine being handed a ziploc bag, and then told to use it to carry a watermelon. It’s kind of like that.

My lord but the body is astounding.

And the OR is kind of astounding, too. I love the pomp & circumstance of it (the nurses asked me my glove size! I got to do that sterile-gown twirl that surgeons do!), although at times that same pomp & circumstance has had me cowering in a corner, afraid to do anything wrong lest I inherit the wrath of the scrub nurse. But usually we student-midwives have nothing to do in the OR but observe (say during a client’s c-section) whereas here a generous Ob/Gyn had invited me to participate. I did small tasks: snipping sutures, injecting local anasthetic, and of course inserting all manner of things into the vagina (speculum & IUD are practically old-hat by now, but video camera was a first). But mostly I watched in complete amazement.

Feeling out of shape for summer? Go take a look at  an appendix.  See how beautiful you are!

No related posts.