Names and Places
In my fiction writing I typically invest almost as many hours choosing the names of people and places as I do writing about them. These details matter; I’ve always felt that in fiction, names should carry layers of resonance that reflect, reinforce, contradict, or otherwise illuminate aspects of the person or place. This only added to the layers of tingly mirror-universe déjà vu, then, when I recently found myself in a real-life place that shares part of my own name. Before zooming in fully on that moment, though, let’s back the lens off for some important context. In 1962, U.S....
Read MoreA Cosmic Equation
It’s a sensation that never quite leaves you, this feeling that you owe your very existence to someone you will never meet. My older brothers were born in 1950, 1952, and 1954; I trailed the pack by a full eight years, arriving in 1962. People often smile when they hear that sequence, jumping to the obvious conclusion and silently thinking “Oops.” And I usually smile back, because it’s easier than explaining the truth, which is—as is often the case—so much more complicated. My brothers and I had known for years that Mom took the three of them away to visit...
Read MoreFate, Grace, Karma
In Believe in Me, Tim Green ruminates on fate more than once as he explores his own belief system. “I’m nobody’s chess piece,” he declares, before turning around a few dozen pages later to admit that “saying that everything that had happened was simply a random string of events felt like the most irrational argument of all. Reason only gets you so far; sometimes the only logical thing left to do is to give in to wonder.” And while that wasn’t intended as commentary on my own career, it applies; two of the best jobs I’ve ever held have had...
Read MoreBeautiful Soul
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain “Maggie is a ray of sunshine.” Margarita (“Call me Maggie”) is also our local guide for the morning in Porto, the namesake second city of Portugal, and my comment is funny both because the country has been trapped in a weird early-summer vortex of thick mist and drizzle for going on four days now, and...
Read MoreThe Right Question
Five months into grieving the loss of my mother, it’s become clear I’ve been asking myself the wrong question about the process. The question I’ve been asking is “When will it stop hurting?” The answer, I see now, is never. Losing Mom, not being able to talk with her or send her a picture or give her a hug ever again, will always hurt. And that’s as it should be. Losing her is too big for it to be otherwise. It’s not that it will stop hurting. It’s that, with time and effort, it will hurt less, and hurt differently....
Read MoreNothing Has Changed (But I Know It Has)
How can I put into words What my heart feels? It's the deepest thing When somebody you love dies – Ian Hunter, “Michael Picasso” Sometimes I think the hardest part of death is just grasping the simple reality of it. One minute a person who fills a space in your heart is here, and the next they’re not. In the song quoted above, the great Ian Hunter was writing about the death of his good friend and longtime collaborator Mick Ronson, who first gained fame as part of David Bowie’s “Spiders From Mars” band during the Ziggy Stardust years. “Michael...
Read MoreEarthquakes
Growing up in California, you get used to earthquakes. They’re impossible to predict, but you always know another one will come eventually. All you can do is prepare as best you can and then try to ride it out, both the initial jolt, and the inevitable aftershocks. My mother is the reason I am a writer. That simple sentence carries within it a multitude of dimensions, most of which we won’t explore here, but its fundamental truth is inescapable. My mother is the reason I am a writer. And now she’s gone. Mom left us a month ago today, slipping...
Read MoreI Need to Know Who the Drummer Is
One of my regular music publicist correspondents sent me an electronic one-sheet recently that caught my interest, so, as I always do, I requested a physical copy of the album he was pitching. I don’t review downloads or streams because that’s a one-dimensional experience, pure sound with no context. A physical release provides artwork and packaging, production and musician credits, and hopefully lyrics—each for me an integral, irreplaceable part of experiencing an album. In this particular case, after receiving said physical copy I fired off a slightly cranky e-mail about the fact that it included no lyrics, credits, or liner...
Read MoreTom Petty: Making Magic
It’s a mark of respect, this business of obsessively listening to our musical idols’ songs in the days after they pass, but also a ritual of mourning. We listen to remember—mourning the artist through their creations—but also to remind ourselves of the inescapable march of time—mourning not just the loss of the artist’s voice, but of the years that have brought us, too, that many steps closer to the great beyond. Tom Petty was a dozen years older than me, but the gap never seemed wide, maybe because I have a brother born the same year as TP (1950), but...
Read MoreNever Break the Chain
Writing a book is a journey culminating in a moment not unlike a key one in this very story: the author hands his or her baby off to the reader, saying "Here. This is yours now." Today we arrive at that moment: the publication of Never Break the Chain, the sequel to Believe in Me. Set among the Malibu mansions and Hollywood rock clubs of California’s southland, Never Break the Chain finds Tim Green’s grief over the loss of his father spinning into an obsessive quest to track down the wayward mother who deserted him almost three decades before. It’s...
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