Ruminations on my favourite Kinkaid. Also, on poverty and other stuff.
I spent yesterday afternoon and evening not writing as I'd planned - something, probably the heat at the MoonAlice show downtown, triggered about as vicious an MS relapse as I've had to date - but, rather, reading. Since the book I have to get done was simply not on the dance card as I kept giving in to uncontrollable tremors down my right side and screaming tooth-grinding pain everywhere else, I opted to do something else with my bookbrain: reread the last book I finished (writing, that is), from cover to cover. I generally wait a month or two, to give myself some distance from it, and it was just about time. Besides, relapse. Who am I to blow against the wind?
Normally, I find tweaks, continuity screwups, the overuse of particular words or phrases. I tighten as I read; I tweak, and push, and pull. I wait to see what jumps out at me, things and connections and themes I might not have realised were there while I was writing it, simply because I was too deep into it, buried, immersed, subsumed, consumed.
So I sat at my computer, taking frequent breaks to go lie down and shiver in pain, try to doze, fail miserably, and I reread Book of Days.
Dear god, I love this book. I love it so much, it hurts. The fifth Kinkaid is, I do believe, my favourite of anything I've ever written.
Did something jump out at me, a theme, a connection? Oh, hell yes.
The Kinkaidverse, as a whole, has certain consonances of theme. They're about loyalty, and memory (that was the basis of While My Guitar Gently Weeps and Graceland). They're about walls, and about how walls can keep you alive and break you down (that was the basis of Rock & Roll Never Forgets). They're about entitlement and self-entitlement, about understanding that power festers and rots if it isn't used for the positive (that was the basis of London Calling. They're all about accepting adulthood, however and whenever it comes to you.
Most of all, though, they're about family. And in this one, in Book of Days, the family unit - the band family, the mother/daughter, the father/daughter, the meta, in fact - shines through like a 500 megawatt arc lamp. The sacrifices we make for family, and the mistakes, and the moments.
Luke, dealing with Solange, dealing with his success as a father and what he perceives as his failure as a stepfather.
The Tahini Twins and their father (not saying more about that; you're curious, you'll have to wait to read it).
John and Bree, finally equals in care, John no longer the child with his chronic illness as the reason for a passivity he can no longer allow himself, no longer the one who takes all the nurturing, accepting adulthood, understanding each other.
And - so vital in this particular book, and yet so minimal in there - Miranda Godwin, Bree's surgeon mother, in her own estimation the "most hands-off parent alive", in London because both her daughter and son-in-law want to give her a splendid birthday present. If she isn't there, if she isn't the beloved recipient of a spectacular 65th birthday present from her only child and said child's rock star husband, the series ends right there.
I love the Kinkaidverse, top to bottom. I love all five books I've written so far in this series. I can hardly wait to begin number six; Uncle John's Band is nagging me, hard and fierce. It has to wait until Dark in the Park is done, though, because I need something Kate can sell. Otherwise, we're homeless. It's as simple as that. (That's the "rumination on poverty" I promised in the subject line, and no, I don't think I'm exaggerating.)
But this one just slays me. I got the last paragraph and I realised my face was wet; I'd been crying for three chapters, and all the way through the epilogue. I am a seriously unweepy reader, but this one got me.
I'm proud to have written it.
(And in other news, we have three events already scheduled for the anthology, and what's more, all three are in December.)
Normally, I find tweaks, continuity screwups, the overuse of particular words or phrases. I tighten as I read; I tweak, and push, and pull. I wait to see what jumps out at me, things and connections and themes I might not have realised were there while I was writing it, simply because I was too deep into it, buried, immersed, subsumed, consumed.
So I sat at my computer, taking frequent breaks to go lie down and shiver in pain, try to doze, fail miserably, and I reread Book of Days.
Dear god, I love this book. I love it so much, it hurts. The fifth Kinkaid is, I do believe, my favourite of anything I've ever written.
Did something jump out at me, a theme, a connection? Oh, hell yes.
The Kinkaidverse, as a whole, has certain consonances of theme. They're about loyalty, and memory (that was the basis of While My Guitar Gently Weeps and Graceland). They're about walls, and about how walls can keep you alive and break you down (that was the basis of Rock & Roll Never Forgets). They're about entitlement and self-entitlement, about understanding that power festers and rots if it isn't used for the positive (that was the basis of London Calling. They're all about accepting adulthood, however and whenever it comes to you.
Most of all, though, they're about family. And in this one, in Book of Days, the family unit - the band family, the mother/daughter, the father/daughter, the meta, in fact - shines through like a 500 megawatt arc lamp. The sacrifices we make for family, and the mistakes, and the moments.
Luke, dealing with Solange, dealing with his success as a father and what he perceives as his failure as a stepfather.
The Tahini Twins and their father (not saying more about that; you're curious, you'll have to wait to read it).
John and Bree, finally equals in care, John no longer the child with his chronic illness as the reason for a passivity he can no longer allow himself, no longer the one who takes all the nurturing, accepting adulthood, understanding each other.
And - so vital in this particular book, and yet so minimal in there - Miranda Godwin, Bree's surgeon mother, in her own estimation the "most hands-off parent alive", in London because both her daughter and son-in-law want to give her a splendid birthday present. If she isn't there, if she isn't the beloved recipient of a spectacular 65th birthday present from her only child and said child's rock star husband, the series ends right there.
I love the Kinkaidverse, top to bottom. I love all five books I've written so far in this series. I can hardly wait to begin number six; Uncle John's Band is nagging me, hard and fierce. It has to wait until Dark in the Park is done, though, because I need something Kate can sell. Otherwise, we're homeless. It's as simple as that. (That's the "rumination on poverty" I promised in the subject line, and no, I don't think I'm exaggerating.)
But this one just slays me. I got the last paragraph and I realised my face was wet; I'd been crying for three chapters, and all the way through the epilogue. I am a seriously unweepy reader, but this one got me.
I'm proud to have written it.
(And in other news, we have three events already scheduled for the anthology, and what's more, all three are in December.)
posted by DebGrabien at
6:42 PM
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