The Illusion of Summer

by Julia Buckley

On a brief spring break on the Lakeshore, I allowed myself to dream of what it would be like to be at the lake in peak season--when there were other people there and the polar winds had changed to balmy summer breezes. I started making up little stories for myself. Version one: I live at a beachfront home in summer. Each morning I wake up and head down to the sandy shore for a long, invigorating walk. It's so enjoyable that I forget it's exercise, and by the end of the summer I lose weight without even trying.


Version two: Each morning I take my notebook down to the beach. While watching the sun gradually move higher in the sky and listening to the gulls call to each other in their quest for food, I am inspired to do some of my best writing. At the end of the summer, three agents fight over my new book.



Yes, something about that scenery made me indulge my dreams. And something about the lure of summer makes me think every year that THIS summer will be different. That I'll find the time to do all those jobs, read all those books, and attend to all those household tasks. I build the illusion of forever around summer, which actually grows shorter every year.



In summers past I, as a teacher, had some time off, but it always seemed to fly right by. This summer I'll be working a second job, so I'm assuming that it will go by even more quickly. And yet I still find myself pushing everything into an imaginary, endless summer. Yes, that's when I plan to read the books, organize the desk, get that garden in order, edge the patio, paint the boys' room, do that entertaining, see those movies. Summer will let me do it all.


But of course I'm placing too much responsibility on the shoulders of fragile, whimsical summer. Before I know it, she will have run off and I'll be facing somber Fall, who will be holding me responsible for all that I haven't done. :)

Still, when I smell that spring breeze and notice new flowers opening with each sunny day, I find myself pinning my hopes on Summer once again. It's foolish, but I guess it's a seasonal reality, illusory though it may be.

What are your summer dreams?

"Oh My Goodness, I'm Laughing Out Loud!"

E. J. Copperman

I am, unquestionably, the world’s worst texter.

It’s not that I refuse to try new technology; I’m a fan. And I show up on Twitter (@ejcop) and Facebook (E.J. Copperman), and do all the other 21st Century things one is supposed to do. I’m not sitting in my 1970 Dodge Dart with the 8-Track player running and wondering why people don’t realize the true artistry of the Bay City Rollers. Not at all. I text, mostly with my daughter, but I do text.

Still, I refuse to conform in one way—I will not mangle the English language. I won’t write “ur” when I mean “you are.” I won’t fail to capitalize a name just because you have to press another key before the letter (don’t we do that on keyboards?). And no matter what the Oxford English Dictionary things, I will not, in any medium, un-ironically write “LOL” or “OMG.” I won’t.

I use words for a living. Words, to paraphrase the immortal Chico Esquela, have been very, very good to me. I think they hold power; they can amuse, uplift, persuade, convince, provoke or galvanize. Words can be weapons or roses; they can be tools or blunt instruments. They can inspire love or rouse the rabble. Words have recently brought change in Egypt and Tunisia. Words fill the Declaration of Independence, the Magna Carta and Mein Kampf.

To turn them into truncated versions of themselves merely to save a few keystrokes and work one’s thumbs less vigorously seems to high a price to pay. I won’t do it.

And so, my daughter (and to be fair anyone who texts with me) has a good chuckle at how long and formal my text messages are—she always says I sound like I’m writing a term paper. I always say she sounds like she’s writing in Estonian.

I teach a writing class at the college level. And every time a new term begins, I have to remind my students that what they will be writing for me will not be text messages. That means “your” and “you’re” have to be used correctly. Punctuation and capitalization will count. “It’s” will only have an apostrophe when contracting the words “it is.”

I’m sure they think I’m a dinosaur, a relic of a different age. Someone whose values are being displaced and obliterated by the onslaught of modern technology. Someone whose opinion on such matters is irrelevant and unimportant.

But then I get to grade them at the end of the term. Those who don’t use proper English in a writing course will see their grades suffer because their usual means of expression comes in 140 characters or less.

This is called “learning a lesson.”

I might be a lousy texter, but I am a really serious advocate for words.

E.J. Copperman is the author of AN UNINVITED GHOST, the second in the Haunted Guesthouse Mystery series from Berkley, which was published April 5. This tale of sand, surf, murder, reality TV and ghosts follows NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEED, which began the series last year.

Whatever Happened to Women's Fiction?

by Sheila Connolly

When this blog posts, I expect to be at the Malice Domestic convention in Maryland. For those of you unfamiliar with it, it’s an annual event that brings together several hundred writers and fans to celebrate traditional mysteries. It’s a lot of fun.


If you scan the crowd there, you will quickly see that the majority of attendees are women, both writers and readers. Since women make up a large of percentage of the readers of this genre, that’s not surprising. However, it’s not true of other mystery conferences such as Bouchercon, where you will see a better gender balance in the crowd. Of course, the definition of mystery there is much broader, encompassing thrillers, procedurals, suspense, etc.


The national organization Sisters in Crime, celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, in 2010 commissioned a survey evaluating who buys and reads mysteries and why. The analysis showed that 65% of mystery readers are female. Why, then, do male mystery writers make more money and get more reviews? One simple (simplistic?) explanation is that women will read across the spectrum of mystery writers and subgenres, but men read books by women much less frequently than do women (and they’re also less likely to read traditional mysteries).


An article in the Southern Review of Books this month adds to the mix the fact that the publishing world is increasingly dominated by women as editors and publishers, but for all of that, in the New York Times Book Review, the New Republic, The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement, reviews of books (all genres) written by men far, far outweigh those of books written by women, sometimes by as much as three to one.


All right, perhaps I’m ranting. Many of us female writers know this, and have known it all along. I started thinking about it again recently because I’ve been reading Meg Wolitzer’s new book, The Uncoupling, published last month. In the story the women of a small New Jersey town all stop sleeping with the men in their lives—and yes, the Greek play Lysistrata plays a role in the book). It’s not a Mystery (although it may be a mystery)—there’s no crime, no blood, no officers of the law poking around. But it felt familiar, and I realized that was because it reminded me of a crop of books that came out in the 1970s—books by Alison Lurie, Gail Godwin, Fay Weldon, Marilyn French and their peers. These were books about relationships and characters—mainly women. Women as wives, mothers, daughters, sisters, and friends (not necessarily in that order). The books were labeled “women’s fiction.”


Somewhere along the line the term acquired negative connotations, although I’m not sure why. But to come full circle, I think I write the kind of mystery I do—call it traditional or cozy or amateur sleuth—because of these books, many of which are still on my bookshelf. In all my books my protagonists are women who happen to solve crimes. They’re smart, they’re independent, and they understand people, and that’s how they unravel murders. At least, that’s what I’m aiming for. And that’s why it’s such a pleasure to go to Malice Domestic, which gathers together lots of intelligent, interesting women who enjoy that kind of book.


One final note: just this week Harvard history professor and author Jill Lepore wrote an article for the New York Times entitled “Poor Jane’s Almanac.” It’s about one of Benjamin Franklin’s many sisters, one who wrote to him regularly, and the one to which he wrote most often—and their letters have survived. A woman who could read in Jane’s 18th-century world was a rarity. Jane Franklin did not lead an easy or happy life, and yet she never stopped reading or writing. Nor do women now, with or without accolades or reviews or recognition. That’s why I wouldn’t miss attending Malice.

We’re off to play at Malice!

Elizabeth Zelvin

Today is the day I pack up my car with bookmarks, chapbooks of my Agatha-nominated short story, dress-to-kill duds for the banquet, the obligatory box of books, and a few boring necessities like toothbrush and clean underwear, and head south on the New Jersey Turnpike toward Bethesda, MD, the site of this year’s Malice Domestic, the annual gathering of traditional mystery lovers. For me, Malice has been one big lovefest every time I’ve attended, even the first time, when I knew almost nobody and had great apprehension about whether I’d enjoy it. Today, on the eve of my fourth Malice, I can hardly wait.

Malice is primarily a fan convention, and I suspect one of the reasons it works so well is that the authors who attend are themselves fans and avid readers of traditonal mysteries. So we’re all in it together, voting for our favorites for the Agathas, getting a kick out of sharing a dinner table with Margaret Maron, Nancy Pickard, or Barbara D’Amato—first come, first served, no celebrity tables at the Agathas!—talking a mile a minute about the books we love, and taking home more of them than we promised ourselves we would.

Malice begins on Friday, and the reason I’m driving down today to get there bright and early tomorrow is one of my favorite features of the con: Malice-Go-Round, billed as speed dating for authors and readers. Groups of readers are seated at fifteen or twenty tables, and pairs of authors make the rounds, presenting at each table in turn pitches that have varied, since I’ve been doing it, from a challenging ninety seconds to a leisurely three minutes. In fact, one year I prepared for ninety seconds and then found we’d have twice the time. I started my pitch with: “I’m from New York City, so all I have to do is talk more slowly.” It’s an opportunity for the authors to give out promotional materials for their new work in optimal conditions and for readers to form a connection with the authors that gives everyone an extra charge that lasts till Sunday afternoon. That sense of connection has me grinning all weekend and hugging people at the drop of a hat.

Speaking of hats, there’s no longer a hat contest at the closing tea on Sunday, but anyone who feels like wearing her most outrageous Easter bonnet is more than welcome to do so. I won the last contest for Most Creative Hat in 2008. It was a black confection with a bobblehead Poe (a favor from the previous year’s Edgars) perched on top and a black bat hanging down, as well as a blood red rose and a little tombstone. You can still see pictures of it on my website.

Besides the Agathas banquet, socially eventful meals include the New Authors breakfast, at which everyone with a first book out gets showcased with a brief but excellent interview, the Sisters in Crime breakfast highlighting the national organization’s work for the year, and what has become a traditional lunch gathering of Guppies, the online chapter of Sisters in Crime that started out as the Great UnPublished and currently has five hundred members—two or three dozen of whom attend Malice—and an impressive collective record of publications and awards. Again, I’m looking forward to a lot of squeals and hugging.

If you’re going, see you there! I can’t wait—and I don’t have to, because I’m ready for the road!

E-books are not the problem

Sandra Parshall

As many of us head off to Malice Domestic, where the traditional printed book is the focus, news from the publishing industry is grimmer than ever. In the first quarter of this year, while e-book sales jumped by 169.4%, sales of print books in all categories fell a total of 25%.

According to the American Association of Publishers, e-books and trade paperbacks were tied in the early part of the year as the leaders in all book sales.

Nielsen BookScan, which covers approximately 75% of retail book sales, reported that in the first quarter mass market paperback sales dropped by 26.6%. (The AAP statistics show an even steeper fall of 36%.) Hardcover fell 7.2%, and trade paperback dropped 6.4%.

Adult fiction lost the most ground among the various categories, falling 18.3%. (By contrast, adult fiction is the strongest segment among e-books, accounting for 61% of sales.) Juvenile nonfiction fell 11.7% and juvenile fiction dropped 8.1%. Only adult nonfiction, with a 1.1% drop, avoided a precipitous fall in print sales.

The soaring sales of e-books takes some of the sting out of the decline in print sales, but the sad truth is that books in all forms are losing their attraction as a source of entertainment and information. Vast numbers of people simply do not read books. Ever. In any format. However, the average Facebook member spends more than seven hours on the site every month. The average American watches more than 84 hours of television each month. Video games also claim a huge share of our attention span, and a single video game will sell more units in a month than all the top 20 New York Times bestselling books combined.

In a recent issue of Publishers Weekly, independent publisher Rudy Shur of Square One Publishers noted that our concern over the rise of e-books and the decline of print books is misplaced. The real competition isn’t between different forms of books but between books and other forms of entertainment. Putting a book on the Kindle won’t suddenly turn non-readers into readers.

All the evidence is that reading as a pastime began to fall out of favor when computers and then the internet became ubiquitous. That decline continues. But as fewer and fewer people bother to read books, those of us with an emotional, intellectual, or financial investment in all forms of publishing spend our energy arguing about whether e-books are good or bad. We should be talking about how to turn more people on to reading. We should be trying to figure out what it takes to lure kids away from video games. We should be trying to reawaken the love of reading in people who may have given it up because they were too busy raising kids and working. We should be persuading parents that reading to and with their kids is good for all of them. While we’re at it, we should support our local libraries in any way we can.

E-books, print books – what good will any of them be when no one is left to read them?

Latching on to characters

Sharon Wildwind

Last week I wrote about inspiration for a new novel. I’m thrilled to report that it’s been a great week in novel land. I’ve had so much fun auditioning bits and pieces of my use-one-day collection to see if they might work in this book.

The only downer was day I found out that the marvelous 1890s brick school building where I attended first grade has been torn down and the land it was on turned into a mall, but such are the perils of research. At least I was able to add to my do-some-day list writing a story set in that building as I remembered it.

This is that heady period, before the first word of Chapter 1 is written, when anything goes and everything works. My plot is inspired, my mystery is devilishly clever, and my characters paragons of just about everything. We all know, of course, that first paragraph in Chapter 1 will begin to rub off the shine, but I’ll just hang on to my illusions for a few more weeks, okay?

I’ve also been re-reading my basic tips binder to remind myself of things I should have already learned. Some things I have learned, for other things the refresher is a good idea. Here are some tips I came across about how to develop characters whom the reader will want to latch onto.

Introduce the character in media res; that is, smack dab in the middle of something with a high physical and/or emotional content.

Give each character a unique name. Mix up names so that there is a variety of sound mixes, number of syllables, and ethnic origins.

Give each character a unique ways of relating to the physical world. This includes their physical description, clothes, food, living spaces, possessions, automobile, electronic gadgets (or lack thereof) and their relationship to each of these.

Limit the number of names and titles referring to one character. For example, a character named William Smith, should not be referred to as William, Bill, Billy, Willy, Willy-Boy, Mr. Smith, the Boss, and Old Red-Face by different characters.

If two or more characters share the same descriptive title—several doctors, or priests, or detectives—give each character a unique name and character sketch so that Father D’Arcy won’t be confused with Father Rafael or Father Whitcombe.

Make it clear immediately how characters with the same last name are related, or if using name confusion as a plot device, give each character an attitude toward being frequently mistaken for the other person.

At the beginning of a book, the reader files every new character with due diligence until she can figure out how important a particular character is to the story. Avoid minor characters in the first three chapters, other than background characters who make the story flow. The doorman at the hotel or the dry cleaner who ruined the protagonist’s best dress, can set events in motion, but they should be mentioned in passing without names or details. The more details the reader is given—that the dry cleaner is named Moe, he’s fifty-five years old, he lives over the shop, and he speaks with a New York accent—the more the reader expects Moe to play a major part in the story. A summary like, “On Tuesday, the dry cleaner ruined my best dress” will cover what’s needed to move along.

A character doesn’t usually gel with a reader until they have appeared least three times, in three different roles or relationships. It’s important to gel all of your major characters with the reader as soon as possible. There is no hard rule about this, but as a general guideline, all of the major characters should be firmly fixed in the reader’s mind by the end of chapter three. The only exception is your detective(s); it’s hard to have him or her show up before the first body is discovered. But then, there are endless discussions about needing a body by the end of chapter three as well.

If you must hold a major character in reserve until later in the book, at least making a general reference to him or her. Statements like, “My sister is arriving tomorrow. You’re going to love her. She has such a sense of humor,” or “What really pisses me off is a guy in a thousand-dollar suit, with that look-at-me attitude” sets up reader expectations. They’ll be expecting the sister to arrive or for the protagonist to meet a guy in a thousand-dollar suit.

-----
Quotes for the week (It’s a two for one week)

Give your reader time to sink into one person’s mind and experience what’s going on there, before you yank them out and pull them into another mind.
~Beth Anderson, mystery and romance writer

Choose names very carefully. Pay attention to the meaning and the sound, and to connotations that people will give a name.
~Elizabeth George, mystery writer

A Celebration of Charlotte

by Julia Buckley

With the success of yet another film version of JANE EYRE, and with a very recent anniversary of Charlotte Bronte's birth, I thought I'd pay tribute to both the woman and her work. On April 21st, 1816, Charlotte Bronte was born--one of six children of a clergyman in Yorkshire. She wrote often, even as a young person, perhaps as an escape from a rather dreary life. In adulthood she wrote under the name Currer Bell. Her greatest work, of course, is Jane Eyre.

I often teach Jane Eyre to freshmen, and I would have to say that it is the most underestimated and unappreciated work of all the literature that I teach. The young people, in general (despite a few fans in every class), cannot seem to relate to Jane Eyre, and yet I wonder why. It's wonderfully Gothic, and young people still appreciate the Gothic elements in their books and movies; it has a touching love story, a strong sense of mystery, a focus on the underdog--the very plain Jane. Yet it often leaves them cold.

I suppose the difference is that many young people can no longer stomach the style--the long sentences, the formal diction (much of which they don't know and often refuse to look up), the antiquated sensibility. This is about a girl, then a woman, who is continually oppressed. What the girls don't always see, however, is the gradual journey Jane makes: from weakness to strength, from ignorance to awareness, from anger to enlightenment. It's a remarkable work, and my continuing job as a teacher is to try to make them see that.

I first discovered Jane Eyre on my mother's bookshelf when I was very young--eleven or twelve,perhaps. I wanted to read it because it looked very adult: it was big, leatherbound, and intimidating. But when I opened it and found Jane sitting behind a curtain at Gateshead, hiding from her horrible adopted family and looking out at the dreary November day, I was hooked. Bronte was a brilliant storyteller, and Jane is such a worthy protagonist that reader can't help but be drawn into her life and to root for her success.

And of course one of my favorite things about Jane Eyre is its mystery; the wonderful sense that there is something going on that Jane doesn't understand, which creates tension for long portions of the book. I don't wish to spoil anything for those of you who might now be inspired to pick up Jane Eyre in honor of Charlotte's birthday, so I'll just say that the mystery itself has made an indelible imprint on our literary culture, and Jane Eyre remains as a beloved work of English literature.

Goodbye is not an easy word . . .

By Lonnie Cruse

I've been a member of Poe's Deadly Daughters since the very beginning. I've loved working with these lovely ladies, excellent writers, wonderful friends, one and all. But it's time for me to move on. Therefore, I'm leaving Poe's Deadly Daughters today and Jeri Westerson is taking my monthly Saturday slot. I wish her good luck. I wish the other "Daughters" much continued success.

I'm now writing non-mystery non-fiction, so to continue to hog a good spot here on PDD isn't fair to other authors and doesn't make a lot of sense. I'm going in another direction with my writing, but I will ALWAYS be a mystery fan and will never stop reading mysteries until someone pries a book out of my cold, dead hands. I'm sure that is true of the rest of you. Mysteries are such fun to read, be they cozies (my personal choice) or fast-paced thrillers (which scare me too much to read, sigh.)

If you want to keep in touch, I will still have a web page at http://www.lonniecruse.com and I will still be writing my weekly newsletter for women: Encouraged Together, every Tuesday. You are welcome to hang out with me at my web page and/or subscribe to said newsletter. Back issues are archived there, should you wish to check them out.

May all your mysteries be great and your TBR (To Be Read) pile ever full, near to toppling over. May you never lose the delight of being so lost in a book that waking up to reality is a bit of a shock. And please remember, I STILL have six mysteries in print, available on Amazon or to order from your local book store.

Thanks ever soooo much for reading me here and in my mysteries. Good--nope, can't type it, so let's just say "So long" for now.

Lonnie

World enough and time

by Sheila Connolly

"Had we but world enough and time…"  Andrew Marvell began his poem, To His Coy Mistress, with that line, in the mid-17th century, and while the rest of the poem wanders off happily into ramblings about fleshly love, that first line is lovely, and sticks in my mind (with a lot of other assorted stuff).


But lately, being limited in my mobility, which in turn limits the range of my activities, my take on time has changed. As I’ve said here before, I’ve been doing a lot more reading. The past week I’ve torn though The Dirt on Clean, by Katherine Ashenburg (which I bought when it came out in 2008 and have only just arrived at), and I’ve started Christopher Kimball’s Fannie’s Last Supper, which was published last year.


On the surface these would seem to be very different books, but both have made me consider how people in any culture choose to spend their time. Perhaps “choose” is too limiting a term, because for a long time most people did whatever they had to do to survive, which consisted mainly of hunting or growing food, procreating, and dying early. No doubt there was little discussion about how to best use leisure time—because there wasn’t any.


Ashenburg addresses attitudes toward personal hygiene, and how different cultures perceived cleanliness over history. Indoor plumbing has been around for a long time (the Romans did a pretty good job with that, as did some religious orders like the Cistercians in the Middle Ages), but its perceived importance has fluctuated widely. At times people thought bathing was evil, and changed their clothing rarely. But the pendulum swung and now many people are obsessed with both personal odors and germs. Have you looked at the range of settings on a new washer? It takes a degree in computer science to figure out how to program one for a simple load. And if you’re supposed to treat each kind of fabric, each color, separately—how much time are you spending at it?


Kimball’s book is interesting because the author takes it upon himself to recreate a (high-end) meal based upon the Fannie Farmer Boston Cooking-School Cookbook from 1896. This involved twelve courses, each incredibly elaborate, all cooked on an authentic cast-iron stove. The author, clearly passionate about both cooking and the Victorian era, also includes a wealth of peripheral detail (who knew that Aunt Jemima Pancake Mix existed before 1900?).

Admittedly this event does not represent the way most people in the country approached making a meal; instead it captures a particular moment in urban, upper-middle-class fashion. In this rarified niche, It took well over two hours to consume such a meal, and that was with servants presenting each course and clearing away the detritus from the prior one. More servants operated below stairs, chopping, peeling, simmering, etc., etc., to create individual dishes designed to impress and delight—and to disappear within minutes, to be followed by the cleanup (imagine all those dishes!). It didn’t last, though. Servants became harder and harder to find, so the woman of the house began to assume a greater role in shopping and cooking, and then there were all those wonderful time-saving machines and packaged foods that came along in short order.


But for all of that, domestic service was a way to enter American culture. For a time a lot of cooks and maids were Irish, and that included my father’s mother, two of her sisters, and two of my father’s father’s sisters, all of whom arrived in New York shortly after 1900. The house I live in now, which in 1910 housed five or six unrelated people in addition to the owners, also had a servant who was Irish—her room was in the unheated attic. By 1920 there was no servant.


Modern perceptions of time, particularly “free” time, keep changing. Take reading (please!). These days it is a luxury to sit down and immerse yourself in a book, to lose yourself in an alternate universe or a wealth of factual information, purely for your own pleasure. The recent and continuing evolution of the ebook is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because books are now available instantly, in a form that can be carried anywhere; it’s a curse because readers now snatch minutes here and there to read a paragraph or a page, before we’re interrupted by something else. Children, teenagers, twenty-somethings reduce their lives to 140-character tweets in an endless stream.


Does this change how we read, and how we write books? Will the rising generation have the attention span of a gnat?  Must we as writers make our stories bigger, brighter, faster, just to keep them fresh in an intermittent reader’s mind? There are those who say that we mystery writers must put the body in the first chapter, and add a hook to the end of each chapter, to keep our readers engaged. We’re happy that they’re reading at all, but how must we adapt to keep them reading?

The up side of aging memory

Elizabeth Zelvin

No, I’m not talking about how much easier it gets, the more we age, to forget whodunit when we put the book aside, so that we experience the joy of a fresh solution every time we reread a mystery—although it happens. I’m not even talking about how, no matter how many songs extol the passionate melancholy of “I will always love you,” when we Google him thirty years later and find he’s married and living in New Zealand, it doesn’t hurt any more—though that too is true.

Like most people, I have some early memories that have never left my mind, lodged there by some kind of mental superglue. Are they random or emotionally selective? Are they true memories, or do I just remember that I once remembered them, as I remember telling these stories over and over in the course of my life? I don’t know. But on some level, I have never forgotten them. I can call up the image of scribbling in crayon on the margin of another little girl’s Bugs Bunny coloring book; of my first grade teacher breaking it to me that I didn’t know everything; of my seventh grade classmates applauding when I returned to class after winning a big spelling bee—and not applauding when I lost the next round. I even remember the word I misspelled that time, back in 1955.

Do the math, and you’ll know I’m no spring chicken. The older I get, the more I experience the truth of certain platitudes. The parent’s warning: “Wait till you have children!” Yes, whatever one’s transgressions as a child, the tables get turned when the next generation comes along. The French saying, Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Look at politics—any level, any time—for examples of that one. Another French one: Si la jeunesse savait, si la vieillesse pouvait. “If youth only knew, if the old only could,” an irony I find playing out in life in all sorts of situations.

But something new and marvelous has been happening to me lately: I’ve been retrieving fifty-year-old memories that were lost until some incident or object, a Proustian madeleine, triggered the recollection. I couldn’t find on Google (on the first page of Google, anyhow) how old Proust was when the dipping of a cookie in linden tea unleashed a flood of memories, seven volumes’worth, in fact. The trigger in this case was smell, although I read a passage about how simple words spoken on film or video in a forgotten childhood language triggered vivid memories of the writer’s (a blogger’s, not Proust’s) grandparents. The phenomenon is called involuntary memory.

My memories have been unlocked not by anything as precise as a scent or a word, but floated up into consciousness in the course of relevant encounters. With half a dozen friends from junior high, I heard one of our number read a passage about his father at a bookstore signing. This group has talked about our friend’s father many times since we all rediscovered each other fifty years later: he was our favorite teacher, and we adored him. On this occasion, the son happened to read a line about how after having a heart attack, his dad went right back to “all his former habits.” And all of a sudden, there was my madeleine: a vivid memory of Mr. C.’s breath. “Your dad smoked,” I said, “right? Did he also use very strong cough drops?” “He did. After he died,” the son said, “we joked about Vick’s going out of business.”

If you’re of a certain age, you may remember actress/singer Elly Stone, who popularized in English the works of francophone/Flemish chansonnier Jacques Brel. I ran into Elly, now over eighty, sat across from her at dinner, actually, at a party given by mutual friends. It wasn’t till late in the evening that I realized she must be that Elly. “Jacques Brel, right?” She confirmed it. As it happens, although I knew of her association with the Brel songs, I had never paid much attention to them. After spending two years in the Peace Corps in francophone West Africa, I had been crazy about Jacques Brel himself and listened to his songs (and sang some of them) in the original French. But I remembered Elly Stone all right, and this memory, too, came out of fifty-year storage for the occasion. “I see you on the stage at Carnegie Hall,” I said. “You were wearing a bright green strapless evening gown.” “Oh, yes,” she said. “It was a Givenchy, and it was absolutely the wrong thing to wear to a hootenanny, but I didn’t care. I loved that dress.”

When did this Carnegie Hall hootenanny take place? Wikipedia tells me it might have been 1958 or 1959. Elly told me which of these two years she wore the green dress—but I can’t remember.