In the Too Funny Department, Caraun Reid – a defensive tackle who graduated from Princeton, sings and plays guitar – may be picked as early as the third round of the NFL Draft. Why is that funny? Because as a novelist struggling to create believable athletic protagonists, I have worried about making them too intellectual and cultural (like me). Then along comes Reid to demonstrate I had nothing to worry about, that God is the best writer and that we shouldn’t be so quick to assume that a jock can’t be a brainiac as well.

But then, I already knew that. In my upcoming novel, “In This Place You Hold Me,” deeply troubled star quarterback Quinton Day Novak attended Stanford where he studied classics. Who’s going to believe this? I thought. Until the Jonathan Martin hazing incident broke, and it turned out, yep, he went to Stanford and majored in classics. You can’t make this stuff up.

How heartbreaking that new film “Philomena” sounds. It’s the story of a woman in search of the love child she was forced to give up by the Irish nuns to whom she was sent after her “indiscretion.” The Sunday New York Times had an excellent, spoilers -riddled article Jan. 12 about the fate of the real child, Michael Hess, a gay man who perhaps not so improbably became a Reagan-era lawyer in Washington D.C. and died of AIDS. The emotional kicker was that he was buried in his mother’s native country in the hopes that she would find him.

Which she did. But all those years when they could’ve had a relationship. All that waste. I could weep. Come to think of it, I did.

There are few more complex relationships than mother and child, which plays a part in my just-released first published novel, “Water Music.” I’m not here to judge why women get pregnant outside of marriage, why they keep or give up their children or why they have abortions. I’ve never been pregnant. The whole thing is beyond me.

But I would like to comment on something that struck me in The Times’ article, and that is the idea that Hess’ friends and associates found him ultimately unknowable. Read more

Art imitates life for NFL-bound Caraun Reid

Mother and child reunion