Are marriage and career incompatible?

July 28, 2014

celebrity couple. It was an enviable lifestyle for those yearning to be rich and famous, but McIlroy’s main motivation was to be remembered for his golf. So in May, with the wedding invitations on the way, he broke off the couple’s engagement.”

Let’s set aside the implication that marriage to Wozniacki would’ve necessarily produced a sort of Duke and Duchess of Windsor lifestyle, with the pair jet-setting from one party to another. And let’s leave off the devastation McIlroy’s last-minute exit caused Wozniacki – a subject I’ve blogged about before...

The rose and the sword: Laurel Gouveia, an appreciation

June 17, 2014

The arrival in movie theaters of the film “Maleficent” marks the return of the archetype – cliché might be a better word – of the Wicked Stepmother but with a twist.

Post-feminist Hollywood is no dummy. It knows in the 21st-century that its filmmakers cannot afford to reinforce the sexist notion of the older woman out to get the Pretty Young Thing, which is the basis of “Cinderella,” “Snow White” and “Sleeping Beauty.” So there has to be a subplot about how the Pretty Young Thing’s daddy did Maleficent wrong when she was a pretty young thing.

You can revise a fairy tale to make the villain more of an antiheroine. You cannot, however, change history. The classic fairy tales, like much of culture, were created by men, who have feared the power of women, particularly the power of older women.

As they age, women develop a certain wisdom, a sophisticated, fluid sexuality – to say nothing of a disposable income. They’re no longer waiting to be rescued or impregnated by men, if indeed they ever were. They are free, and that’s powerful and frightening, particularly to the sex that has always held all the toys in the sandbox.

Because of their bodily cycles, women remain, though, the more visible reminder that we are all, if we’re lucky, going to get old. And we’re all going to die. Men don’t like that. With the Pretty Young Thing, they can pretend to be virile forever. With the powerful Crone archetype, eh, not so much.

I’ve been thinking a lot about stepmothers and female archetypes this past weekend with the passing of my own stepmother, Laurel Gouveia, after a long illness.

Art imitates life for NFL-bound Caraun Reid

May 8, 2014

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.

Mother and child reunion

January 16, 2014

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