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Christmas Letters

2017: My Year in Books

Posted on December 22, 2017

I’m not sure if I’ll muster the will to write a Christmas letter this year, mostly because my will has been sapped by much of 2017 on both the personal and political fronts. As the saying goes, if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say it at all.

There is, however, one thing about which I have only nice things to say, and that’s all the lovely books I’ve read this year. Sure, I’ve read far less in 2017 than 2016, a fact I attribute directly to the draining of my attention and energy by the personage currently occupying our White House. But I’m grateful to my bones for the knowledge and enjoyment provided by every single one of those I did manage to get through, so I’ll turn my festive cheer their way.

Let’s keep up the positive vibe with a shout out for Nina Stibbe’s Paradise Lodge. I first read Stibbe’s charming collection of letters, Love, Nina, about her time as nanny to the editor of the London Review of Books, and it turns out she’s a terrific novelist too. Paradise Lodge is the second novel in a series about the Vogel family, but you needn’t have read the first—I didn’t—to enjoy this one. The protagonist, teenager Lizzie Vogel, who works at a decaying but somehow still charming nursing home while trying to finish school, is so deftly drawn that I loved every minute I spent with her. Also, I don’t think it spoils things to say it has a happy ending. I suspect people might need one of those just about now. (I’m not sure why the cheery yellow cover of Paradise Lodge doesn’t appear in the photo above, but I hope it’s because I gave my copy to someone else to enjoy.)

Now that I’ve sweetened you up, I’m going to go ahead and hit you with Claire Vaye Watkins’s Gold Fame Citrus, a post-apocalyptic—by which I mean a totally believable, especially after this year’s fire season, twenty-first century version of the dust bowl—novel about a couple fleeing California with a neglected baby they’ve kidnapped, who ends up an unlikely messiah figure. The writing is stunning and cinematic, and someone better make a film out of it so I can bluster about how the book was better.

Two other novels I enjoyed this year were Rachel Cusk’s Transit, mostly because I’m deeply drawn to her detached protagonist Faye, and Robin Sloan’s Sourdough, which has a much more conventional (read: likable) protagonist in the form of Lois. If you work in tech and like food, I think you’ll like Sloan’s story, which includes gentle send-ups of both those cultures. I also got to see him read at Mrs. Dalloway’s (more on this special store below) after I read the book, and it was fun to hear him talk about writing it. I like that he’s a developer and a writer.

My favorite novel of the year was Carson McCullers’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. I bought this a few years back at a literature festival in England (not sure why it was there since McCullers is long dead), and randomly picked it up to read earlier this year. I subsequently gathered she’s famous in some corners of the literary world, but why McCullers is not as well-known as Harper Lee is beyond me. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is the nihilist version of To Kill a Mockingbird, and it’s brilliant. The novel is populated by an ensemble cast, but the young female character of Mick Kelly slayed me. I once worked with a guy who had named his daughter Scout after Atticus Finch’s daughter in To Kill a Mockingbird. I don’t have kids, which means the highest honor I can bestow a character in a book is to name a pet after him or her. Let’s just say there’s a cat called Mick Kelly in my future and leave it at that.

Now for the non-fiction portion of my reading list, starting with three books of author’s diaries: Alan Bennett’s Keeping On Keeping On, David Sedaris’s Theft By Finding, and Joan Didion’s South and West. I wrote an essay about them here, so I won’t say more except that if you like these authors I also think you’ll like these books. Robert Moor’s On Trails: An Exploration is a terrific book that reminded me I like science and is a great example of how to riff on a theme in non-fiction. This book is so much more than a story about someone who hiked the Appalachian Trail. Finally, Will Schwalbe’s Books for Living is a lovely book for anyone who adores books, with the bonus that each essay is the perfect length for a bath. If you’re still looking for a gift for someone, you could do worse than this book packaged up with a nice bottle of bubble bath.

A few of the books I read this year don’t show up in the pictures in this post because I checked them out from the library. I’ve spent much of 2017 in Berkeley, and one of the benefits has been access to two remarkable libraries—the downtown Deco and Craftsman extravaganza just a block from my office and the mock-Tudor Claremont branch, complete with a gas fireplace and comfortable chairs. Three cheers for libraries and all their card-carrying members.

The other delight of Berkeley is its terrific independent bookstores, including Moe’s Books on Telegraph; Revolution Books, where I made a point of shopping after alt-right bullies decided to intimidate the staff; Pegasus Books, from whom I buy the Weekend FT (mostly for its terrific Books section) each Saturday, plus whatever else they tempt me with, whether a cute greeting card or a little tin of “impeachmints”; Issues on Piedmont Avenue in Oakland, quite possibly the most wonderful newsstand left in America; and best of all, the gem of my neighborhood, Mrs. Dalloway’s. This is a beautiful bookstore with a helpful staff and a sparkling roster of author events, and I thank them for making the neighborhood feel, well, like a neighborhood.

For all my trepidation and uncertainty about 2018, one consolation remains: it will come with more great books. Happy reading!

Bought but not read in 2017. Something to look forward to in the year ahead!

Christmas Letters

Christmas Letter 2016

Posted on December 24, 2016

Portmeirion from on high

2016 made short work of qualifying as an annus horribilis what with the holy trinity of horrors that is the Trump presidency, Syria, and the seemingly endless string of deaths of beloved artists and entertainers. I have been devastated by these things to varying degrees and observed with worry the deep suffering they continue to cause others less protected by the socio-economic bubble I inhabit, although I’m keenly aware said bubble is not impenetrable.

Somewhat to my embarrassment, despite all these things, I still find that my ability to experience both exasperation and joy daily is driven by matters much more pedestrian than those that make the news. (I’ve always excelled at compartmentalization.) And since this is a Christmas letter, I’ll focus on the joy rather than the exasperation. 2016 has been an annus horribilis and yet I also was privileged to occasionally enjoy the ride.

In May, we completed my ambition to walk the Cotswold Way, a 102-mile path along a Jurassic-age escarpment in southwest England. I took to the trail in the spirit of a religious pilgrimage with the modest intention of figuring out what to do for the rest of my life. (At that point we had agreed to leave Berlin at the year’s end, which I assumed meant quitting my job.) As the saying goes, solivtar ambulando: it is solved by walking.

Despite my grandiose vision of this walk giving me space to think and figure stuff out, its real power was narrowing my world. Choosing what to wear is surprisingly easy when you’ve only packed three shirts. For the duration of the walk, all our worldly possessions fit in two backpacks, and the most taxing decision of each morning was whether to switch to a fresh pair of socks. Once outside, there was a path to follow and a destination to be reached, one step at a time. Never once did we have to ask what we should do that day. Any spare brain power was taken up reading from the National Trail guidebook I carried in a waterproof map holder around my neck.

By the end of the Way, there had been no lightning bolts of insight, but the sights and sounds alone had been an embarrassment of riches: panoramic vistas, Neolithic long barrows, a cricket pavilion built by J.M. Barrie, and a fairytale tower designed by Capability Brown, to name a very select few. Not to mention pubs—so many pubs, the best of which, The Woolpack in Slad, was Cotswold writer Laurie Lee’s local. To ask for more from the Cotswold Way would have been downright greedy. And walking the trail had solved a problem—it just wasn’t the problem I thought I was walking to solve. What I would do next remained unknown, but our hike had at least ended the paralysis of modern life’s infinite choice and given us an actual vacation for the ten days it lasted.

Oh, and in all my pontificating I forgot to mention the most important thing: it was really good fun.

Our other major discovery of the year was much more serendipitous, a coastal village in north Wales, Portmeirion, best known for being the set of a 1960s British TV series, The Prisoner. We went mostly because husband was a fan of the show, and I fully expected to find the sort of dank, depressing British holiday accommodation that hadn’t been updated since The Prisoner was shot.

You approach Portmeirion through the stark drama of Snowdonia National Park until finally, improbably, you are in an Italianate seaside village. It’s a sort of Disneyland for grown-ups, staffed solely by people you wish were your aunts and uncles speaking with that lovely, lilting Welsh-accented English. The alfresco café serves local Welsh cheeses and Italian wine and the village bookstore specializes in Welsh literature and the whole thing backs on to a forest of giant rhododendron and hydrangeas criss-crossed with gentle walking paths. I immediately developed a mild obsession with Clough Williams-Ellis, the late architect and mastermind of the whole operation. We liked Portmeirion so much we went back to celebrate our 15-year anniversary in June, the first of hopefully many return visits.

Husband also fulfilled a long-held ambition this autumn, which was to buy a convertible in which to cruise the highways and byways of California. Thankfully for me, his mid-life-crisis car was not anything too ridiculous, unless you find a white VW bug with a blue denim roof and Herbie “53” magnets on the doors ridiculous. Proving I have become my father in at least one way, I refused to trade-in our twelve-year old Volvo to make the purchase, and I fully plan for these two cars to be the only ones we have for the rest of our lives. Channeling an elderly relative who refuses to take the plastic off her “good” settee, husband has thus far refused to remove the plastic and paper coverings of the floor mats and arm rest in a purported effort to retain that new car smell. I’m encouraging him to ask a therapist about it.

In October, I decided to take my health seriously and switched to a vegan-plus-seafood diet. I was exposed to some excellent research that persuaded me to take the plunge, despite my misgivings about never again eating cheese. That wine is vegan was some solace, and I am happy to report it has been much easier than expected thanks to the vegan-friendly offerings of both Berlin and California. It has even been liberating in the same way I found the experience of constricted choice on the Cotswold Way liberating. There’s no more agonizing over what to order at a restaurant—I take whatever is on offer that fits my needs. A bonus is the veil of insufferable vegan piety that I happily don, even though I’m not primarily motivated by the ethics of eating this way.

Earlier this month, I officially left Berlin for the second time. In January, I will start work in Berkeley, continuing my work-world-tour of cities that start with B—Bristol, Boston and Berlin having preceded this latest gig. I’m counting on my employer opening an office in Barcelona next.

We spent the last few days tearing around Berkeley trying to find an apartment, our expectations lowering with each successive viewing of what can most charitably be described as hovels. Then, at the eleventh hour—literally at 6pm the last night we were in town—we found a gem in a charming neighborhood. It is a lot like the apartment I had in Los Angeles when I was twenty-five, except three times more expensive. I’m trying to rationalize it as a return to my youth.

To be fair, the neighborhood has a lot going for it. Husband appreciates the art-deco-fronted cinema, while the organic-with-vegan-options ice cream shop and French bakery appeal to the always-hungry person in me. We were already on our way to sign the lease when the landlord dropped that writer Michael Chabon was practically our neighbor—a factoid that seemed custom-created by the universe to titillate me.

We’re looking forward to new adventures in our new digs in 2017. Until then, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and here’s to a better New Year!

Christmas Letters

Christmas Letter 2015

Posted on December 23, 2015

In March we took an opportunity to return to Berlin from California for my work—by which I mean to keep my job we moved. We told ourselves it was a chance to travel, and it was. We visited various outposts of Berlin, touring Frederick the Great’s summer palace in Potsdam, the churches where Bach conducted choirs in Leipzig, and nearly capsizing in a car-battery-powered houseboat on a storm-ravaged Müggelsee, whose shores are lined with DDR-era dachas.

Elbe-side garden of Hotel Helvetia

Farther afield we stayed at an eco-hotel (as far as I could tell this meant light wood furniture and guests wearing Birkenstocks) in Saxony Switzerland, a national park between Dresden and the Czech Republic border that I’ve wanted to visit since I saw a TV show about it years ago on the BBC. This is the landscape of sandstone mountains that German romantic painter Casper David Friedrich made famous in his painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, but we mostly clung to an earthbound bike path between towns and villages along the wide river Elbe. Here kelly-green buoys strained against the current like giant waterskiing gnomes. It was spargel (asparagus) season and we ate well.

Post-Hebdo and pre-Bataclan, we had Paris. We walked from our Berlin apartment to the Hauptbahnhof and, two trains later, stepped on to the platform at Gare du Nord and flâneused and flâneured to Île Saint-Louis, which I like to think gives us bragging rights to say we walked to Paris. That evening in the Marais we drank enough wine that it seemed like a good idea to buy a pack of Marlboro Lights, which is to say just the right amount of wine for a Thursday evening in spring in Paris. The next day we rented a tandem bike that we pushed more than we rode along the traffic-clogged left bank before returning to the Marais for an encore of the night before.
In Belgium we regretted spending only one night in Antwerp in favor of two in Bruges, regrets that we soothed with local brews and plans to return. I have a rain check for a date with some of Rubens’ fat ladies at the cathedral.

View from the Alsatian village of Itterswiller

In September we cycled around Alsace for a week and ate one of those lunches that can make a vacation, at the kind of place you decide to stop at only to get out of the rain that turns out to be full of charm at every turn. Le Pressoir de Bacchus is run by a husband (front of house) and wife (chef) team who will let you park your bikes in their covered private courtyard, assist you in translating the menu with a French-English dictionary they keep behind the bar since there’s no cell phone signal and therefore no Google Translate, and all the while pretend not to notice you’re dressed in appalling stretchy cycle clothes that the local French patrons wouldn’t be caught mort in. Oh and you eat a crayfish and mussel risotto that makes your very picky husband realize he does in fact like mussels, to say nothing of the Baba au Rhum for dessert. Long live Baba au Rhum. (It will not surprise you to learn that this year I was one of those insufferable people that takes pictures of their food, all cataloged here rieslingdiaries.tumblr.com.)

The Guvnors’ Assembly assembles at The Royal Oak in Tetbury

In October I took an unplanned trip to NYC to see my niece and her parents. We took selfies on top the Empire State Building, saw Matilda on Broadway, and brunched with an old college friend, but I suspect if you ask my niece her highlight was the hour she spent with my college friend’s daughter digging mica out of the boulders near the Columbus Circle entrance to Central Park.

In a year of travel luxuries, the biggest luxury was that we were able to take monthly return visits to our beloved Cotswolds. It’s a destination that needs no embellishment, but visits to the old-timey Giffords Circus with husband’s aunt and uncle and a vintage-themed cycle outing with the jauntily-attired Guvnors’ Assembly were highlights.

Paris from Pont Louis Philippe

While humble brags are the bread and butter of a Christmas round-up letter, it seems strange not to mention the two defining news events of a year living in Europe, the attacks in Paris and the ongoing refugee crisis that will see up to a million people arriving in Germany before the year is out. Since the attacks in Paris I’ve found myself making silent and foolish-in-their-perceived-logic calculations about mundane choices in daily life—is this restaurant or airplane route or Christmas market more or less likely to be a target—and still, like everyone I know, I’ve gone on doing all of these things. Life is anything but business as usual for the tens of thousands of refugees that arrived in Berlin this year, their presence largely shielded from view by the urban spread of the city. Like Los Angeles it’s a city whose sprawl makes it perhaps too easy to remain in your own enclave.

Back in America for the holidays we’re looking forward to hanging out with my niece in Florida. I have high expectations for the Christmas present I’ve bought her, a jumpsuit with a navy-blue top and gold-sequin shorts that looks like something you could wear to tap dance your way undetected into the chorus line of 42nd Street. I suspect she will be more impressed by some iridescent shrapnel of a shell she scavenges from the beach. And this, I think, is a humble yet hopeful wish to leave you with. May we all scavenge something shiny from this holiday season. Merry Christmas and happy new year!

Christmas Letters

Christmas Letter 2014

Posted on December 23, 2014

I am writing this Christmas letter late and with some amount of ambivalence (much as I imagine you might be reading it), mostly because at this point in the year everything that could have been deemed vaguely interesting about my life has already been plastered on social media, leaving little point to this endeavor except, well, it’s tradition. And, after all, it’s the time of year for traditions, not to mention the fact that I’m holed up in the resident’s lounge of a pub in the Lake District where it’s pouring outside and the bridge to Ambleside has likely been washed out for the night, which means we can’t go see the film we thought we might and so I may as well as try to entertain myself, and hopefully you, with an attempt at the traditional Christmas letter.

The best pub in Britain, mostly because they still sell Scampi Fries

The year was marked by Big Family Occasions, namely my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary, which we celebrated in Coronado, and my sister’s wedding and adoption of her daughter on the same day in March. D. and I have taken to the roles of aunt and uncle like ducks to water, not least because my niece is, in a word, marvelous. We’ve had several visits with her over the course of the year, most recently when we hosted Thanksgiving at our house and she proved the Pacific Ocean in November is nothing to fear.

My sister and her daughter masquerading as 2 specks in twilight near Ventura Pier

Over the summer we moved (again). We sold our house in Santa Monica and moved up the coast to Ventura, news that seems to universally leave people, to put it charitably, confused. I’m not sure if this is because Santa Monica has achieved some kind of mythical status in the popular psyche leaving people to wonder why we would ever leave such an Eden, or if Ventura has achieved such dubious status as to leave people wondering why we would go there. If it’s the former, I might suggest that you haven’t been to Santa Monica lately and therefore wouldn’t know that Eden is no longer navigable by car (and only by bike at high risk to your life). Or perhaps you currently live there and are therefore invested in maintaining the Eden perception (with all due respect, I only suggest this possibility because I lived it). With regard to the latter, it’s possible you’ve heard the epithet of Ventucky in reference to my new home, which I suspect has been devised by local residents to deter an influx of outsiders. Mostly, though, Angelenos don’t seem to know much about Ventura—including me until I considered moving there—having only driven by it on the 101 on the way to somewhere else like Santa Barbara. If you, too, fall into this category, consider that you now have a reason to stop.

Our own epiphany came after having spent most weekends of 2013 and early 2014 in Ojai—an amazing small town that, judging by the travel press, seems to be having its own moment in the Zeitgeist—and deciding that this might be an indicator we should move there. After assorted real estate fits and starts, and ultimately deterred by the prospect of 100+ degree weather in Ojai in the summer, we were wooed the 13 miles down the mountain to Ventura by a view of the Channel Islands and a sleepy-beach-city-vibe that feels a lot like Santa Monica about 20 years ago when *gasp* I first moved to Los Angeles.

Serra Cross Park, named for Father Juniper Serra, founder of the San Buenaventura Mission

In the six months we’ve been in Ventura there have been lots of exciting discoveries for us newcomers, not least of which is the city’s burgeoning art scene. My surprise at this fact revealed my possession of the worst kind of urbanite snobbery, the disbelief that anything of cultural significance could exist outside my insular city world. It was a lesson I had learned once before moving from London to the Cotswolds, and yet I fell prey again to the thinking that art was the provenance of certain zip codes. Also, did I mention the Mexican food? There is a street in Ventura called The Avenue where you will find chile verde as spiritual experience. I have made it my mission to consume the establishments of The Avenue in whole, like a burrito, over the coming months.

Another revelation of the move has been access to central California, namely the parts of Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties that were just a little too far out of reach for a weekend away when we lived in Los Angeles. Our favorite discovery has been the wine/wild west town of Los Alamos, which gave D. license to buy (and wear) a cowboy hat while riding an actual horse around the vineyards. His love affair with California has been reignited.

The whole family saddles up for a ride on the range

In 2014, I spent far too little time writing in favor of the work-that-pays-you-money-kind-of-work. I did manage a few things, including my first-ever print magazine feature for our local edition of Edible and an essay about healthcare in America which will appear in The Rumpus in the coming weeks. I am particularly proud of the latter, which is called Big Pharma Is Trying to Date Me and Other Quirks of Being Sick in America, both because the subject matter is important and an outlet I respect *self-consciously guffaws that Cheryl Strayed and Roxane Gay and Steve Almond have written or currently write for it!* is going to publish it. I will, of course, post on social media when it’s up and hope you’ll stop by and read it.

Until then, wishing you and yours the very merriest of Christmases and a Happy New Year!

Christmas Letters England

Letter from the Lake District: Christmas 2013

Posted on December 22, 2013

The Christmas lights on Regent Street in London

I’m writing this year’s Christmas letter in front of a crackling fire in the resident’s lounge of possibly the best pub in Britain, the Britannia Inn in Elterwater, Cumbria. Our trip to England has so far been an embarrassment of rural idyll riches, having started in the Cotswolds where, for the first two weeks, we requisitioned the flat of our dear friends (a.k.a., Rupert and Ralph) and finished out the remaining work weeks of the year. We’ve now embarked on the northern leg of our journey to spend Christmas and Boxing Day with husband’s family, starting with an interlude in the Lake District.

The Britannia Inn, Elterwater, where we nearly divorced while arguing over the answer to Maggie Smith’s Oscar winning film during the pub quiz

Between all the bucolic bliss, we managed to spend 2 nights at the Portobello Hotel in Notting Hill, which I highly recommend if you want to feel like you’re in a Richard Curtis film. The room featured a freestanding bath tub with a view of a private garden (yes, just like the one Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant broke into in that film). Breakfast in the sitting room consisted of the most beautiful heap of scrambled eggs sitting atop a piece of toast with the crusts trimmed off. It arrived, of course, beneath a silver dome. All this pampering didn’t come without its price, but seeing as we were celebrating husband’s 39th birthday for the tenth time, it seemed apropos.

Favorite breakfast ever. Certain it was made by Mary Poppins.

We also managed to indulge in a little shopping, spurred on by the discovery of the charming shop, Stumper & Fielding on the Portobello Road. On a stretch of London that’s been blighted by tat, Stumper & Fielding is a bastion of English sartorial standards, from Tootal scarves to Loakes brogues. Husband got so carried away he purchased a pair of booties of the latter make in a size too big, a fact he failed to notice until he had marched the length of Kengsington Gardens, Hyde Park and Mayfair to deposit ourselves at the Duke of York’s theater for an evening of Jeeves & Wooster (splendid, go see it if you’re in London). Blistered and bruised, he hobbled into Stumper & Fielding in the morning to find that, amazingly, for only a pittance to cover the re-soling, they were willing to exchange the shoes. What could I do but buy myself a velvet-collared Harris Tweed blazer to express my gratitude at their professionalism?

Husband, crippled by his new shoes, leans on his favorite shop

Here I will pause for a moment to acknowledge my self-consciousness at the outpouring of wonderful life-ness I have just directed you to read. I fear you may be finding this year’s Christmas letter devoid of the gleeful Schadenfreude you had hoped for, and I wish to provide comfort. You see, this is a Christmas round-up letter, which means I am practically legally obligated to only write about pleasant events. Rest assured that I, in fact, pay very good money to a very nice lady each week to divulge my life’s tribulations. I think we can all agree that’s the appropriate place for such strife.

I did toy briefly with the idea of telling you about my challenges earlier this year of finding an MS medication that didn’t involve a needle and feeling like I had the flu on a weekly basis. But then I was reminded of the dreaded part of my weekly telephone conversation with my mother in which she debriefs me on the maladies of people I last saw thirty years ago. Terribly dull stuff, so, suffice it to say, I have settled on a twice-daily pill that also happens to be used industrially to make foods taste sour. Its worst side effect is to occasionally give me ruddy cheeks. If it makes you feel better, you can also use the MS narrative to justify the indulgence described above—you know, ‘life’s short, live it while you have your health’ kind of stuff. But, let’s face it, we both know I was a skilled indulger before the arrival of that dratted disease.

You may also take some comfort in the fact that my first book, Americashire, failed to, ahem, crack any bestseller lists. Somehow, despite this, it was the highlight of my year: a fantastic education marked by some terrific moments. These include meeting my fellow inaugural She Writes Press authors at our joint event in Berkeley in May and collecting the Indie Reader Discovery Award for Travel Writing at Book Expo America in New York in June. Husband was a supportive presence at both, and a big hit with the literary ladies. I also have a debt of gratitude to all of you who so patiently put up with endless self-promoting tweets and Facebook posts. Some of you were even so kind as to buy the thing and write nice stuff on Amazon and Goodreads. Thank you. You can’t imagine how much your actions mean.

Me at Book Expo America, prouder than I have any right to be

Back in California there were highlights, too, including our BYO Zen sitting group, seeing husband’s two idols, Shatner and McCartney, on stage together in a benefit for the Los Angeles Shakespeare Center, and our discovery of Ojai, or, as we like to call it, the Cotswolds of California (which I wrote about here). And so, friends, I think this place of gratitude for the year is a good one from which to take my leave. A pint and a packet of Scampi Fries await me in the pub. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Christmas Letters

Christmas Letter 2012

Posted on December 24, 2012

This year was rather bucket-listish. Or at least I thought it was until I went to see a screening of Elf last night and director Jon Favreau informed the crowd he had just flown in from working with Martin Scorsese, thus crossing off a major item on his own bucket list. Suddenly my bucket list seemed so underachieving…so middle class…so middlebrow.

Nonetheless, here are the things I count on my bucket list this year.

1. We finally made it back to L.A. This was more on husband’s bucket list than mine, but, predictably, now that we are back I like it better than grass-is-always-greener spouse.

2. To get to L.A. we drove cross-country from Boston. Before we left that fine city, we enjoyed a debauched weekend with friends from England and visited Provincetown at the tip of Cape Cod. On our journey west we saw Niagara Falls, spent the night in a Harold Pinter- themed hotel room in St. Louis, ate Frito pie in Tulsa, watched a steak eating contest at the Big Texan motel in Amarillo, Texas, and stopped to see where Clark Gable honeymooned with Carole Lombard in Oatman, Arizona.

Gracie

3. After a lifetime of failed attempts, I have a cat that likes to cuddle. Meet Gracie. She was my grandmother’s cat and luckily for us the person who had rescued her after my grandmother passed away was looking for a new home for her when we moved back to California.

4. Much to husband’s distress, I travelled to Beijing, Delhi, and Reykjavik (twice!) for work this year. I am going to go ahead and count Iceland as a proxy for Antarctica and thereby declare I have fulfilled my childhood ambition to travel to all seven continents.

Captain America meets Captain Kirk

5. More exotic than Beijing, Delhi and Reykjavik combined was the Star Trek convention in Las Vegas, where husband fulfilled his childhood ambition of meeting William Shatner.

6. I did a five minute stand up set in a comedy club in L.A. Warning: I say the c-word (NOT cancer) a lot.

7. My book, Americashire, is coming out on She Writes Press in March 2013. I will be bothering you substantially about it in the new year, but for now I would be terribly grateful if you could take a moment to like the Facebook page.

One thing that was NOT on my bucket list was to be diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, but life is sometimes like that. Earlier this month I experienced “persistent neurological symptoms,” which is a rather fancy way to describe the right side of your face feeling like you are fresh from dental surgery. I have since seen two excellent neurologists, one of whom I am proud to say deemed me as “too neurologically boring” for her and unworthy of her specialist skills on an ongoing basis. (This same lady was on Extra earlier this year talking about MS in a short clip that is very informative if you are interested. video platform video management video solutions video player Oh and Extra! How very L.A. is it for your neurologist to appear on entertainment television?) In general this seems like a manageable condition that should have little impact on my life, and I am looking forward to starting my new routine of weekly “shooting up.”

On the husband front, he continues his rampage through global entertainment organizations. Following a stint at Paramount Pictures he has recently joined the happiest place on earth, Disney. Let’s hope he leaves it that way.

And now, in the words of Psy: Dress Classy. Dance Cheesy. Merry Christmas 2012, Gangnam Style.

Christmas Letters

Christmas Letter 2011: A Tale of Two Cities

Posted on December 23, 2011

This year’s Christmas letter is being written later than usual. I blame Facebook. After a year of prolific posting, I am frankly bored of myself. (I can only imagine how my Facebook friends feel.) Still, despite the never-ending status updates featuring snapshots of husband drinking Riesling, there are a few things left to say about our year.

River Spree, Berlin

2011 is a tale of two cities, one I will tell here in the type of revisionist history that befits a Christmas letter. In other words I will highlight all the best bits and skim over the seething underbelly of marital discontent I provoked by our move to the first of those two cities, Berlin. It was not exactly a life of hardship, what with the company-sponsored Mercedes and apartment, not to mention all that two-euro-a-glass Riesling. And yet while I revelled in nostalgia from my childhood time there in the eighties (courtesy of my father’s employment flying shuttles with Pan Am), husband felt like he had gone back in time to the grim environs of northwest England circa 1976.

To cheer him up we made frequent visits back to the Cotswolds, like the time we went back to celebrate a little local wedding. We watched from the wine bar — where else? — as Kate and Wills tied the knot, then celebrated our own tenth wedding anniversary a few months later in Paris. But returning to Berlin did not get any easier for husband, although it was lightened by a few welcome visits from friends and family. Late in the summer my personal best interest aligned with my professional best interest when I finagled a new job opportunity at my company into a move stateside, where husband was yearning to return. And so in October I bid my goodbyes to Berlin—her golden Lizzy, her Käsespätzle, her nudist Tiergarten sunbathers.

Elterwater, Lake District

We returned to England where we were treated to a special melodrama facilitated by the US embassy in
London. Husband went in for what should have been a routine visa interview, and yet somehow my plans for post-interview celebratory champagne at Claridge’s turned into manic taxi rides around London securing missing paperwork before degenerating into a week of obsessive waiting for his visa to arrive. When it did we finally felt secure enough to start saying our goodbyes to those places and people we had grown to love most over the past six and a half years, up in the Lakes then back down in the Cotswolds where our last stop before Heathrow was, naturally, the wine bar.

Boston Common

In November we arrived in the second city of our tale of two: Boston. We quickly felt at home — it’s not called New England for nothing. (Husband was, I daresay, a bit miffed to find that his collection of cravats, bow ties, and tweeds would fail to achieve the desired effect of standing out as English in this town.) After skirting our way around “hills” in Europe — the still-waiting-for-gentrification perimeter of Notting Hill, the ‘wolds, and atop an old rubble heap that comprises one of the few rises in Berlin — we have settled on Beacon Hill, complete with views of the Common and Public Garden. Sure being above one of the busiest crossroads in the city means it sometimes sound like we are sitting track-side at Nascar, but never mind for now. We are told that soon enough the snow will come, nature’s welcome muffler.

The year has ended on a sad note. My grandmother, Willie Pearl, passed away at the age of ninety-two. (I wrote a little about her here.) There is nothing nice about death, but the fact that this one happened so close to Christmas forced my family to let go of any expectation about the holiday. There are fewer presents under the tree and no turkey in the freezer. This is all fine with me. At the risk of having an expectation, I’d be happy with scrambled eggs for Christmas dinner.

Merry Christmas to you and yours, whatever your table holds!

Christmas Letters

Christmas Letter 2010: I am a Jelly Donut

Posted on December 23, 2010

When Kennedy gave his famous speech declaring, “Ich bin ein Berliner,” some pesky linguists claimed he had mistakenly called himself a jelly donut. It turns out his grammar was correct since President Kennedy was speaking figuratively rather than literally. It also turns out that either interpretation now applies to me. After a couple of sunless months and a week of German food– flammenkuchen, wiener schnitzel, kartoffelpuffer, spaetzle, rotwein, weißwein, glühwein– my flesh now bears a striking resemblance to a powdered sugar-covered, Mr. Donut raspberry-filled. I’ve also decided, largely on the basis of a pastrami sandwich (step aside, Canter’s), to accept a job in Berlin in the new year.

If only the decision was that easy. The truth is that husband and I flip-flopped as many times as John Kerry during our four-day “decision visit” to Berlin. There was, of course, trepidation about turning husband into a trailing spouse, which I recently learned is the official diplomatic term for those in his situation. It also didn’t help that there was so much snow on the ground that my lingering impression of the city is of an upturned cola slurpee. But it did help that we found a great neighborhood with a great apartment in former East Berlin, five minutes away from the office and the purveyor of that pastrami sandwich. And so, shortly into the new year, the strapline for this blog will get an additional clause: “One woman’s journey from burritos and margaritas to tea and scones” will become “One woman’s journey from burritos and margaritas to tea and scones to bratwurst and bier.”

Our year has ended with a bang after eleven months of mostly blips. Perhaps the most important thing in the year was what didn’t happen at all: any further recurrence of the neurological symptoms I experienced last year that put me at risk for multiple sclerosis. The only thing related to multiple sclerosis that did happen this year was our London to Paris charity bike ride which so many of you graciously supported and for which we are grateful. We also made a return visit to France in the autumn to cycle through Provence, which husband now refers to as the broke-down seventies holiday thanks to the general state of modernity of the hotels we patronized. But the important things — wine and food — were good. Back at home we enjoyed showing off the Cotswolds to friends and family on a couple of weekends. We will miss it but we plan to visit once a month, and we hope to welcome you in both places.

Until then, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you!

Christmas Letters

Christmas Letter 2009

Posted on December 21, 2009

The defining personal event of this year happened in March when I got sick. Physically speaking neither the symptoms nor the treatment were very dramatic. I slurred my speech so subtly that even my coworkers and family had trouble detecting it, was treated with a high dose of intravenous steroids for three days running, then spent two weeks in bed sleeping, reading and writing. The recovery was even, dare I say it, enjoyable during those moments when I wasn’t thinking about the looming implications of the whole thing. But there were implications, namely if I had a second spate of neurological symptoms like these I would be diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. It is a disease that lacks both an explanation and a prognosis, more of a name for a collection of symptoms than the promise of cause, calamity, or cure that the word “disease” implies.

The three months between my recovery and my follow-up appointment with the neurologist were spent adjusting to this new reality of living in the not knowing. (Of course all of life is living in the not knowing, it’s just that most of mine I’ve been lucky enough to maintain the delusion of “knowing” afforded by the luck of birth, relatively stable employment and relationships, and material comfort.) Husband and I both thought and spoke of the “what if” daily. I monitored every physiological tick with the vigilance of a sniper, and husband still doesn’t let a confused consonant or dropped syllable slip by without asking, half-joking, if I have MS. The follow-up appointment finally came and, despite the fact that this three-month symptom-free milestone was of no statistical significance for my chances of developing MS, I felt liberated from obsessing about the possibility.

It was during those preceding months that I had the brilliant idea that husband and I should do a four day bicycle ride from London to Paris next May to raise money for MS charities. It was an act borne of that time when I needed to exert some control, when nothing else was bending to my will. But the truth is now that I’ve been healthy for nearly nine months I don’t want anything to do with MS, even (maybe especially) charity. Undoubtedly those of you who have been within earshot or blogshot of me in the past year feel the same way. However, I have decided to do the ride; it will be character building, no? And I am fat, which can only be helped by a little cold weather training for an endurance event. And it’s a convenient excuse for a trip to Paris, where I can undo all that training by consuming my body weight in confit de canard and vin blanc within hours of arrival.

The MS scare was the low point of the year but there have also been ups, notably husband’s reaction to the whole thing. By his own admission he is a high strung nancy-boy at the best of times, and yet during the crisis he became possessed by an unfamiliar demon of rationality and support. I was also granted dual citizenship of this fair country, which came with the invaluable right to get in the shortest customs line at Heathrow. And I was promoted, putting me back in the realm of the music business I thought I had left behind for good last year (third time’s a charm, no?). Husband survived the launch of the latest entertainment extravaganza, coming to a theatre near you in 2010. He did this notably without killing anyone in his workplace — with only the help of the occasional prescription neuro-enhancer and the bent ears of both his long suffering wife and his plump Irish shrink. And just because we like to create stress we decided to sell our flat in London and buy another one — a fixer upper to ensure the stress keeps on coming — closing on both in the same week that I had to be in three different countries for work. Finally, there was my personal moment of zen 2009, Levi Johnston’s Vanity Fair interview about life with the Palins.

I end with a request that this holiday season you give to our charitable endeavors with the same level of fervor with which husband and I have recently courted chaos in our lives: reckless abandon is welcome and, for once, you’re guaranteed to feel good the next morning. Every penny / pence / eurocent of your donations will go to the charities as husband and I will cover the costs to support our trip. Just think how guilty you’ll feel if my brain decides to attack itself again. Low blow? Yes, but remember it’s all for charity!

To sponsor me click here.

With much gratitude I wish you a merry Christmas, happy Hannukah, and a happy, healthy new year!

Christmas Letters

Christmas Letter 2007

Posted on December 17, 2007

A magazine to which I subscribe has been running a “Life Takes Visa” ad with a “Things to do while you’re alive” list that annoys the hell out of me. It’s because the items on the list (sample: “Go to the NFL Pro Bowl”, “Spend a weekend in Las Vegas like a high roller”, “Test-drive a supercar”) describe a twit. And because it implies that I, as a member of this advertiser’s target demographic, am also a twit. However, I am not immune from my own life ambitions and at the age of approximately 12 decided I would like to visit all 7 continents before I die.

This year I came as close as I ever will to achieving that goal given no one really ever expects you to make it to Antarctica (unless global warming makes it a more hospitable tourist zone in my lifetime which I suppose is a possibility). I ticked six out of seven boxes with an October visit to Africa with my sister.

Like many things in my life it was more lucky than deliberate circumstance through which the trip materialized. My sister was working in the Middle East and Cairo is only a four hour flight from London. Voila! The pyramids and souks and mosques and the giant old curiosity shop that is the Cairo museum were ours to behold.

The best discovery of the year was closer to home—the Cotswolds, which on a good traffic day is 1.5 hours and another world away from our flat in London. We liked it so much that we decided to buy a cottage there, continuing our world domination in the postage stamp-size real estate market. Now husband is busy acquiring a tweed wardrobe and I am considering shooting lessons. (I’ve made friends with the only gays in the village and even they have their own shotguns.)

In the further spirit of lists, here are a few of my favorite things from the past year:
1. The Guiting Festival in the Cotswolds held on one of the few sunny days of the summer complete with hog roast and a ragtime band imported from Paris for the day.
2. Wine tasting in Dambach la Ville in Alsace with a nice lady who pretended she could understand my butchered French 101 and the workers who has just come in from the harvest with plastic bottles of cloudy wine nouveau.
3. Reading the book Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything by Elizabeth Gilbert.

By the way, I completed a draft of this “Christmas letter” on September 30th, before Cairo and the cottage were a reality. I did this in the woo woo spirit of unabashedly putting my wishes out to the universe, something I kind of learned in the book mentioned above. I wrote then: “I’ll come back to this before I send it out in December and let you know if I need to make any revisions.” And I’m happy to say that none are required.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Do write and tell me all your good bits (or even bad ones) too. Looking forward to seeing some of you soon in FL or LA.