courtney summers » personal

raise your glass

courtney — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 04:52:29 +0000

2011 was weird and painful. There is not a whole lot I want to say about it right now.

Today first pass pages for THIS IS NOT A TEST arrived at my door. I went through and made my corrections, which is the last part of the process for me as an author. Next come ARCs, publication….

For my last post of the year, I want to share with you its dedication:

Love in the new year.

about my dad, by my mom

courtney — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 01:58:55 +0000

I am hijacking Courtney’s blog today to pay a small tribute to the love of my life, David Summers, who was taken from us a week ago today. Courtney’s tribute to her father captured him quite perfectly with no room for improvement. But during a time of endings I would like to share a beginning…

My father-in-law gets the credit for bringing David & I together shortly after the family’s move to a farm just outside of town.

“There’s a cute girl working at the local Becker’s store, why don’t you ask her out?” he suggested to his son.

And in what was likely one of the few times David embraced parental authority he did just that, appearing during my shift, wearing a plaid shirt, dirty jeans and an uncharacteristically short haircut.

It wasn’t love at first sight. But he was persistent, a trait I would become familiar with over the years.

He showed up every day to offer me a ride home from my shift. Every day I declined.

He drove into town on his tractor. He even rode the five miles in on his horse.

Still I did not relent.

Then one day he showed up at my door. I never told him where I lived but he searched the phone book for everyone with my surname and through the process of elimination he hit the jackpot.

He came armed with his guitar and proceeded to serenade me in our gazebo …much to my parents’ alarm.

We sat by the shore of the lake and talked into the wee hours of the morning …much to my parents’ alarm.

I never once looked back.

We viewed life in pretty much the same way, just from completely different angles. We made each other laugh, got under each other’s skin and everything in between. The bond between us was stretched at times, but never broken.

The phrase ‘soul mates’ makes me cringe, but we were definitely that. My heart always skipped a beat whenever I saw him. We would have celebrated our 34th anniversary this month, and 35 years of knowing each other. I am fortunate to have had that time, but I can’t help but feel cheated.

“Ideas are clean. They soar in the serene supernal. I can take them out and look at them, they fit in books, they lead me down that narrow way. And in the morning they are there. Ideas are straight–
But the world is round, and a messy mortal is my friend.
Come walk with me in the mud…” *

* Hugh Prather, Notes to Myself

thank you

courtney — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 17:53:54 +0000

Yesterday, people gathered at my grandmother’s house to celebrate my dad’s life.

My dad would have been so touched to see the faces that came out to pay their respects. His brothers. Friends he lost contact with but always thought the world of. Friends and faculty from school, who were such a large part of his world these last two years and who made the whole experience that much more rewarding. Family who drove from so far away because they couldn’t imagine not being there to say goodbye and thank you to Dave. We’ve gotten phone calls and cards and flowers from so many different people who were so shocked to hear he’d died but grateful they got the opportunity to know him. He honestly would not have believed the level of love he inspired–he really underestimated his impact–but he would have been so incredibly touched by it all. I know we were.

This was my father. I’m sorry for everyone who has lost him but after yesterday, I’m sad for everyone who won’t get to know him too.

I wanted to post this entry to thank everyone who has contacted me–be it here, my email, through comments on Facebook, replies on Twitter, private messages on both, places the blog entry fed into, sent flowers, cards… friends and readers and kind strangers… you’ve offered condolences and support, warm thoughts, prayers, some of you even shared stories of your own loss and shown understanding. My family read every last message. Every last one.

I don’t think anything about this can be made easier–now that the flurry is over, we are all bracing ourselves for what’s next–but I do want to tell you that your reaching out meant the world to us and it has made a difference. ‘Thank you’ doesn’t even really seem to cut it in return, honestly, but it’s all I’ve got. And I really mean it.

Thank you so much.

david summers, 1955 – 2011

courtney — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 01:24:21 +0000

My dad died today.

When he was 54, he decided to go back to school to be an environmental technician. It must have been hard going back to college, learning alongside young(er) students at an age in life when people probably assume you’ve got one eye toward retirement, but he did it. He wanted to be an environmental technician, so he put his nose to the grindstone for two years and graduated this last June. He graduated with honours and on the Dean’s List because it was not enough for him to go and do the minimum required, he wanted to do his absolute best and he did. It was such a big, big moment in his life and he was so proud of himself.

We were so proud of him.

He was no stranger to hard work. He loved to farm. There was little more gratifying to him than tilling soil, planting vegetables. Looking after the earth. The (rare) times he could coerce me into maaaybee doing some dirty work, he could not contain his glee. And those (rare) times I did, he often liked to pause afterward and express how happy he was with what was done, what I had contributed, and how great the work we did looked and didn’t it look great? When it was my turn to comment, I’d usually just show him the new blister I got which was totally his fault. He laughed and teased. He liked to tease. He did it often, with great affection. We teased him back just the same.

He was a man of action. He genuinely wanted things to be better where they could be better and he took up causes–good ones, lost ones–and gave his all to them, for better or worse and never for want of praise and glory. I think, I will always think, for the rest of my life, he should have been appreciated so much more for what he gave.

He was passionate about the environment, about politics and world affairs. He loved to argue. He loved to present one side of an argument and wear you down until you saw his point, and then as soon as you’d conceded, he’d switch sides. There was always, “just one more thing,” to say when my father was at the head of the table discussing the topic of the day. No one thrived on these debates more than he and my papa (his father-in-law) did, I think. I hope they’re getting caught up right now. I really do. And I hope he’s with his father now, who passed away in 2003, and who he also missed so much and was devastated to lose.

He was a big reader. He loved crime dramas and bad sitcoms. He grudgingly let my sister indulge in Jeopardy at the dinner table. My dad was crazy for the arts. Passionate about theatre. One of the best moments of his life was bringing Man of la Mancha to the local stage. We still have a tape of it. I was eight or nine when I saw that play and it made me want to climb onstage and be an actor because I wanted to move people the way that I had been moved. I thought my dad was a genius to bring that world alive in our tiny town and make me believe in it, that his vision and interpretation of that musical could bring me to tears. I wanted to inspire them that way, make them laugh, make them cry. I hate musicals but I will always love that one. Later, I wanted to direct, like he did (my directorial debut was in the fifth grade, a murder mystery I also wrote and starred in cough) and then I wanted to write for the screen and eventually, it became books. I think the want to be a storyteller–and that is the one thing in my life that has remained consistent, that has inspired many of my choices–took root when I was sitting in the audience, watching Don Quixote rise from his death bed…

DON QUIXOTE: But this is not seemly, my lady. On thy knees, to me?
DULCINEA: My lord, you’re not well!
DON QUIXOTE: Not well? What is illness to the body of a knight errant? What matter wounds? For each time he falls, he shall rise and woe to the wicked! Sancho!
SANCHO PANZA: Here, your grace!
DON QUIXOTE: My armour, my sword!
SANCHO PANZA: More misadventures!
DON QUIXOTE: Adventures, old friend!

Thank you for inspiring me, Dad.

This is so difficult.

He loved my mom. LOVED. Loved her.

He loved his family. His wife, his daughters, his mother and father, his mother and father-in-law, his son-in-law, his brothers. He loved his friends. He loved.

He was loved.

We found out he was sick at the beginning of September–cancer–and things progressed faster than we imagined. Hope was meted out to us sparingly, dashed as quickly as it was offered. My father, the kind of person who always had to be doing something, always had to be doing something for someone, my father the fighter, never got the opportunity to fight.

It was one of the last things he said.

“I just want to fight.”

He resisted until the end. They weren’t his terms and he held on until he couldn’t hold on anymore. Those last hours, minutes, seconds…

Those were difficult too.

The heart has been ripped right out of this family.

Everything is less interesting now, a little more meaningless, without him here. There’s nothing beautiful about it, nothing in this loss that will ever make it worthwhile. It is so unfair. He should be here.

56 years old.

He did a lot of what he wanted, which is something nice to think about–or will become nice to think about one day, I hope–considering how short his time on earth turned out to be. He wanted to fly, so he flew. He travelled. He ran a lapidary business. He reinvented himself several times over the course of his life and each time, it was impossible not to see a man who was striving to be his best self and getting a little closer to it each time. He was a thoughtful a person, a complicated person. No one could frustrate me quite like he did and there was no one I wanted to impress more. I loved him. He was a good, good man. He was good man and he worked hard and I’m sitting here typing this, thinking, why didn’t we all say it more? He deserved to hear it as much as possible.

You were a good man, Dad.
You worked hard and you earned every breath.
But you deserved so many more.

Love you so much.
Miss you already, more than there are words for.

still

courtney — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 07:45:38 +0000

Three years on June 3rd.

I like to make note of it on my blog for myself and for him. He used to visit here all the time and loved to read the comments everyone left. He thought it was the most incredible thing, people reaching out to his granddaughter from their computers. I used to check my site stats and was able to tell when he visited, which I loved. It was like he was waving hello. I been trying hard to think of what I want to say about it all–his death and life now, after–and I’ve decided it’s this: I miss him more each year, not less, and I keep him in my heart.

More:
For Ken (2009)
Grief & Writing (2010)

good news & treadmill desks

courtney — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 06:46:53 +0000

January has been pretty good to mean girls! I’m so thrilled to share that Some Girls are was selected as a YALSA/ALA 2011 Top Ten Quick Pick for Reluctant Readers (along with Kody Keplinger’s debut, The DUFF–congrats, Kody!), ALA selected it for their 2011 Best Fiction for Young Adults list and it’s a 2010 Cybil finalist in the young adult fiction category. I’m so happy and grateful about this. Librarians and book bloggers and librarian book bloggers (book-blogging librarians?) are AMAZING and that is all there is to it.

For anyone crazy enough to disagree:

(I never get tired of that one.)

For reals, the lists are a fantastic resource for any reader and I have to say I was particularly excited to see CJ Omololu’s Dirty Little Secrets, Amy Reed’s Beautiful and Carol Lynch Williams’s Glimpse on the Quick Picks list and Lucy Christopher’s Stolen, Tara Kelly’s Harmonic Feedback, Melina Marchetta’s Finnikin of the Rock, Daisy Whitney’s The Mockingbirds and Glimpse on the Best Fiction for Young Adults list. They’re all books I’ve read in the last year or so and loved very much. If you haven’t read them wat, I say wat, are you waiting for?!

So judging by the fact my last blog entry was written last year, I have been deliciously neglecting… my blog. Sorry! Despite this, I’ve been taking care to keep the What People Are Saying section of Fall for Anything’s page updated, so if you want to check out what people are saying about it head on over. Thank you, as always, to those who have taken the time to help spread the word about Fall for Anything, online and off. It really, really helps.

Anyways, the reason I have been so deliciously neglecting certain aspects of my online life is because, well. I’m busy and I’m tired, Internets! I spent the holidays launching Fall for Anything whilst juggling family-centric holiday stuff (as you do) and revising the last 130 pages of Book 4, which blossomed into 160 pages or something ridiculous before emailing it to my editor directly after the new year. Yes, it is with my editor, which makes me equal parts afraid–the good kind of fear–and happy. I think that emotion is called ‘hafraidness,’ but don’t quote me on that. But sweet beautiful wonderfulness it is off my desk for the moment and that is a very nice feeling.

And because my new year’s resolution is to write two books this year (I never make new year’s resolutions but the world is ending in 2012, so), I decided to take the opportunity to start outlining and working on Book 5. This is what that outline looks like so far:

Then I wrote like 25 pages of Book 5 on my Treadmill Desk (MORE ON MY TREADMILL DESK IN A SECOND IN CASE YOU LIVE UNDER A ROCK AND DO NOT KNOW) emailed my agent and said I wanted to see if I could finish this thing by the end of March or early April because I am insane or because, as my good friend Kim suggested to me recently, I secretly <3 the pressure. Probably she is right.

But anyway, let's BACK THE EFF UP and talk about my treadmill desk! If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook you have heard all about it and you are bored of it all by now but check out my treadmill desk those of you who don’t know and those of you who have seen it already:

Treadmill desks have always been in my periphery thanks to authors like Arthur Slade, Joelle Anthony, Marsha Skrypuch and Helene Boudreau (all Canadians!) and this year, I decided to take the plunge and get one for myself. I gots me a treadmill and my handywoman of a mother (you would never see my mom on Canada’s Worst Handyman ever, just FYI) threw together the desk in like a day. The above photo was taken when it was a work-in-progress. Now it is painted to match the treadmill and has a drink holder and is altogether fancier, I say:

I have had it less than a week, but I am cautiously optimistic about a long-term commitment to it and excited about the health benefits! It feels kinda perfect. I’ve tried various exercise regimes and they’re all eventually lost to me because I’m a bit of a workaholic and if I’m not working, I feel like I’m WASTING TIME. Capitals. And then exercising feels like a CHORE. And the time I spend doing it just crawwwwls by and tears flow down my cheeks and it is all very depressing. Basically, I look at exercise as something I need to get over with until I eventually give it up.

That’s awful.

But this! THIS! This marries productivity and healthy exercising in such a beautiful way that time actually flies by on it which is the most amazing thing. And it did not take long to get the hang of walking and typing AT ALL. Basically, I love it.

I also love adding “sent from my treadmill desk” to the end of the emails I send from my treadmill desk, which is way awesomer than sending an email from an iPad/Pod/Phone, Blackberry, whatever you crazy kids are using to communicate with other people these days. SENT FROM MY TREADMILL DESK. AW YEAH.

(This blog entry, I should note, was not written from my treadmill desk but it could have been. I KNOW. I just blew your mind.)

Halloween 2: Attack of the Chipmunk!

courtney — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 01:49:27 +0000

So there is this chipmunk at my grandmother’s house that is crazy levels of tame. He thinks he’s people! We are pretty sure he’s going to hibernate in a cozy, secret space in my grandmother’s porch and so we are doing our part to help by ~~interfering with nature~~ making sure he’s set for the winter. We give him lots of peanuts. He LOVES peanuts. He BEGS for peanuts. He hops up to the door and begs through the glass and he has crawled up legs and sat on knees for them. This is terrible, objectively, but also it is adorable.

Remember my pumpkin? I don’t blame you for forgetting about it. It was only two days ago I blogged about it, after all. Since you have probably forgotten all about it, here is my pumpkin:

Tonight, I went to my grandmother’s house armed with ingredients for my Halloween Feast (which turned out AMAZINGLY TASTY, jsyk) and set the pumpkins outside to light when the trick or treaters started rolling in. I still lamented that they were not the best pumpkins we’ve ever carved, but at least we were celebrating the season! While I did this, the chipmunk hopped around my feet and got some peanuts for being so adorable and then I went inside and he studied my pumpkin.

EVERYONE’S A CRITIC!

Or maybe our chipmunk is an artist and thought taking a chunk out of the mouth was all my pumpkin needed to be PERFECT? But still, whether it was an act of vandalism or artistic expression–rude! he could’ve asked permission before he started carving away with his teeth!

After we discovered it, we did the only reasonable thing there was to do. We promptly awarded his bad behaviour with more peanuts:

And actually, his creative touch on my pumpkin didn’t turn out so bad at all. Here it is lit next to an adorable and awesome ghost my grandmother created (which we also used as a center piece for the Halloween feast!) when it was still light out and then when it was dark, in all its ghostly pumpkiny glory. Pretty awesome, huh?

Soooo… remember when I told you 2010 was a pumpkin disaster of epic proportions? I LIED. In the end, my pumpkin turned out beautiful thanks to the help of Picasso the Chipmunk and my sister shaved down the inside of her pumpkin and it looked MUCH better. It looked EXCELLENT. It’s amazing what a little shaving and a more natural setting can do for a pumpkin! So I take back what I said before. This year was an Official Pumpkin Success!

Especially for him.

Pumpkin Massacre

courtney — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 20:53:26 +0000

I am eating roasted pumpkin seeds as I type this. YUM!

Remember when I said there would be more Fall For Anything giveaways? And you guys called me a liar? Okay, that ‘liar’ part didn’t happen but it all works out because I wasn’t lying! St. Martin’s Press is giving away 24 copies of Fall for Anything on Goodreads right now (US residents only). Check it out here. There are 32 days left to enter.

I’ve got a wealth of book related updates and then I am going to tell you a sad Halloween tale. First, I’m thrilled to announce that Some Girls Are has been nominated for OLA’s 2011 White Pine Award! I am so excited. The Festival of Trees is making less of a hermit outta me. I attended the celebrations last year and I will definitely be attending them next May in Toronto. They are way too fun to miss.

Second, Fall For Anything ARCs have been making their way around the book blogosphere (scary!). The amazing Sara of The Hiding Spot gave it a stellar, spoiler-free review that you can read here AND the rockin’ James from Book Chic Club featured FFA for Fragment Friday! Fragment Friday is a meme where you vlog an excerpt of your current or favourite read. Remember how I posted the first five chapters of Fall For Anything? Well, he read the sixth! Watch it here. Thank you, Sara and James!

AND NOW ONTO SAD HALLOWEEN STUFFS. If you have been following my blog for a couple of years, you know that pumpkin carving is a relatively serious past time in the Summers’ household. I say relatively serious because there are people that take pumpkin carving REALLY seriously and I don’t want to undermine them. Here are the pumpkins Megan and I carved last year:

That is the Cheshire Cat from American McGee’s Alice and Bruce Campbell. You can go here to see pictures of our pumpkins past. You’ll notice a trend in that generally the way it goes is, I pick a pattern I’m satisfied won’t make me break into TOO much of a sweat and then Megan picks an explosively complicated pattern she can outdo me with and I let her have it because usually she has to do the hard parts of my own pumpkin and I’m nice that way.

This year, we had big plans. BIG PLANS! We got two pumpkins EACH. We were both going to outdo ourselves and carve the best pumpkins in town. Not only in town, BUT IN THE WORLD! But that is not what ended up happening. If we had known this, we might have made different choices. But we didn’t. Blissfully unaware of our pumpkins’ sad fate, we put these movies in the DVD player and watched them while we worked:

(Hocus Pocus, Disney’s Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Night of the Living Dead, oh yeah.)

This year I chose the most complex pattern I was… willing to do. It was a silhouette of Norman Bates standing outside his house. A fairly iconic image, if you know anything about somethin’:

OH MAN, you guys. Shading and carving. I made the big mistake of getting bored halfway through and deciding I could shade the whole thing freehand with uhm, a steak knife. Which is apparently not what you should do. So that went all to hell. And then I tried to salvage my pumpkin by carving this guy’s face on the other side:

And then that went all to pieces and I gave up. I guess everyone has an off year? My heart is into the season but I guess it was just not into pumpkin carving. I ended up going for something with a more timeless feel. Something that was also pretty simple to carve because I was down to ONE PUMPKIN and after that, there would be no more. I decided to carve Sam’s pumpkin from Trick ‘r Treat which is a horror movie I do not even like that much (overhyped, massive disappointment!), but I have to give props to the pumpkins because they were pretty great:

Get ready to be disappointed by my take on Sam’s pumpkin because it lacks the flames of hell shooting from it. My sister said we could probably rig my pumpkin to do that but I don’t want to set any Trick or Treaters on fire. OR DO I? Anyways:

My sister decided to do that dude from Pan’s Labrynth, with the eyeball hands. The pale man! Her pumpkin was really thick so it is a kind of abstract final result until/if she shaves it down more from the inside BUT APPRECIATE THE INTRICATE CUTS AND SHAVING which you can’t totally see here because of the lighting but seriously:

She is now hard at work on her second pumpkin because she still has one, unlike me. It will be from A Clockwork Orange and I will post it here when she’s done. Edit: Here it is!

Anyways, I am not dwelling on all this pumpkin carving related tragedy because I am a survivor. I am putting all of my passion into the Halloween Feast I am making for my family this Sunday because FOOD is always worth the effort. Here is the menu, which is way more impressive than any pumpkins that happened this year and let’s just never speak of pumpkins again ok sob.

I’m making grilled lime chicken with black bean sauce and braised onions from Simply Recipes. I made both of these things before, very recently, and they were big hits. So not the spookiest things ever, but something everyone will enjoy. Alterations to the chicken recipe: it’s baked in the oven with the onions. I also make garlic sauce to go with it (a bunch of minced garlic mashed with salt, mixed into some sour cream, mayo and lemon juice–all to taste) which–YUM! Tastes amazing layered on top of the black bean sauce. I am also debating boiling and simmering the black beans in vegetable broth for some ~extra flavor~.

This will be served with Martha Stewart’s Mashed Boo-tatoes because they are the CUTEST THINGS:

picture from Martha Stewart

Look at those adorable faces! AND proscuitto-wrapped grissini:

picture from epicurious

IT LOOKS LIKE FLESH WRAPPED BREAD STICKS! Perfect for Halloween. Dessert will be a pumpkin cheesecake, which my Grandma is making because I can’t bake anything to save my life. It is in celebration of my sister and brother-in-law’s wedding anniversary which also COINCIDENTALLY falls on Halloween.

It is going to be so good.

AND YOU ARE ALL INVITED!!!!

I have given you two day’s notice and left a trail of clues for you to follow all the way to my dinner table.

Now I am going to go start chopping cilantro in preparation for this fantastic feast, while my wrists can still work after all that traumatic pumpkin carving. :(

HAPPY HALLOWEEN, INTERNET!

august through a lens

courtney — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 23:42:19 +0000

I’m more than a little behind, I know. Summer is a crazy, blurry passage of time–or at least it’s turning out to be one. Who told August it was okay to be August? I do not know. The other week my great aunt passed away. She was only 66 and she was a very kind woman and she will be missed.

In less sad news, the winner of my Awesome Books Week giveaway is Angie! Angie was contacted and the books are one their way to her as I type this. Thank you everyone for taking the time to read the interviews, as well as commenting on them. It was my pleasure to spotlight and share some fabulous, contemporary YA fiction with you. I hope you’ll check them out!

Other than that, not a whole lot is going on. At least, nothing that makes a very good blog entry. Post-Fall for Anything it seems like I am dealing with a little creative burnout, writing wise! I’ve been trying to write through it (it’s what I’ve got to do!), but the other night, I MAY have taken a break to transfer some old photos from one computer to the other and got a little bit nostalgic. It made me realize how much I missed taking photographs. There was a point in time where I didn’t go very far without my camera. It was a nice outlet, and a revealing one; I could always tell writing was not going that great when I picked up my camera and that the writing was moving along when I was neglecting it…

Anyway, I haven’t played around with my D80 like that for a while. Which is terrible because it is a fantastic camera. And also lame of me because photography plays a huge part in Fall for Anything (spoiler: Fall For Anything is actually about killer and/or posessed cameras!), so ANYWAY, I took out my Nikon today and here are some photographs I took:

It was at times, a little frustrating getting reacquainted with my camera but mostly it was nice, so maybe I will take some more photographs tomorrow.

grief & writing

courtney — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 18:00:32 +0000

My grandfather has this sweater he’d wear constantly. Blue with black patterning. It’s hard to conjure up a memory with him not wearing it. He had it so long, the wrists wore through and my grandma had to sew them up. After he died I asked if I could have it. I wear it sometimes.

The last week of May always reminds me of trips to and from the hospital, navigating the back streets of the city in the car with my mom and my grandmother. One trip stands out. I am not sure how close he was, if we were right in the middle of it or nearing the end, but it was a beautiful day and I made a mental note to remember that. I can still see the houses, the trees and the shadows they cast in the sun. I don’t know why I told myself not to forget that exact moment but it’s stuck in my head and it is so vivid.

Waiting rooms. Soft cushy chairs and couches, the carpets. Standing outside the hospital at night, watching people go in and out. How the air felt out there. I remember the breeze exactly.

This is probably so morbid, but if there is one subject I think I could write about over and over again, it’s loss and grief. The way it transforms us. I will never stop being fascinated by the inescapable reality of losing people and the the things we carry after someone we love has gone. How we cope. The questions that kind of loss inspires.

I try to carve out answers in books, one published, one to be published, lots not, knowing full well I’m not going to come away anymore satisfied than I was when I started. I just end up with more questions, which almost inevitably become more books. But there’s something in asking those questions out loud, I think.

Sometimes it’s not just asking those questions, but trying to articulate a certain feeling–physical and emotional–so it can be more understood, so there is less loneliness in having it. Like, I’ve always wanted to know if everyone’s throat gets so constricted it aches right at the top and it’s like there’s something there you can’t even swallow around? And it hurts so much you can’t even speak. But in that exact spot. At the top of the back of your throat? It’s sort of like how I get brain freeze except not, which is totally weird, I know, but the best way I can describe it. Or how grief can make your skin feel like an electric bruise.

Fall For Anything is a book about grief and loss. It was a hard book to write. Sometimes it would veer left when I thought it should be going right and other times it was just the opposite, but in the end I think it did what it was supposed to and I think everything is exactly where it’s supposed to be on the last page. Mostly, I wanted it to be honest. Peeling off a band-aid. At one point in the book, Eddie thinks, I think to find some kind of understanding, you have to be as close to the truth as you can get to it. I believe in that, whenever I write and whatever I write. Otherwise, what is the point?

I drafted Some Girls Are at my grandparents’ house, that summer. It is not a book about death, which is sort of funny because I was surrounded by my grandfather’s absence when I wrote it. I wrote in the kitchen all through the night and I always had a bottle of water, a cup of coffee and a can of coke next to my laptop. Sometimes, when I was stuck, I would wander into the dining room, where there are photographs of him. I would look at them. I would go back into the kitchen. I would sit in his chair. I would get back to work.

It will be two years this Thursday.

We put a solar light on his gravestone. I like to go past it when we’re in the car at night and see it.