Feel free to check out the latest podcast of my new show, Writers Revealed, by clicking here. This week was all about family, particularly the notion of the “bad mother” and I chatted with authors Elissa Schappell (Use Me), Liesel Litzenburger (Now You Love Me), Sabina Murray (A Carnivore’s Inquiry) and Victoria Redel (Loveryboy). After we chatted about their individual books and the mother characters in each, we delved into discussion about what makes a good mother, can we define it? is it a mother who’s fascinating or a good caretaker? is Dina Lohan a bad mom? How do parents shape their children? Challenges that today’s mothers face, including raising children in this age of influence (internet, tv, movies) and influential marketing, and we also discussed choice feminism in Leslie Bennetts’ The Feminine Mistake and have we back-peddaled on feminism?

And we talked about the soccer mom and Michael Apted’s documentary 7Up.

And I said “sort of” (oh wait, not true. GODDAMN) and “interesting” less this time - thank god! But listening now, I’ve discovered the word “fascinating” - who knew such a word existed? I have to say that I have the utmost respect for folks who produce podcasted/radio shows. It’s tough, but this journey is incredibly amazing. I hope you’ll keep tuning in!

Next week (6/3, 7pm EST) I’ll be chatting with Leslie Bennetts (The Feminine Mistake) and I’ll be taking live calls. Got a question for Leslie (because, hey now! i’ve got books to give away)? Leave them in the comments field below.

Click here for my previous posts on Bennetts and her book.

About the Book: It would be easy to dismiss this as yet another salvo in the mommy wars-—the debate over women opting out of careers to be stay-at-home moms. But Bennetts, a longtime journalist and writer for Vanity Fair, is more interested in investigating what she sees as the heart of the matter: economics. Through impressive research and interviews with experts and with real women, Bennetts shows that women simply cannot afford to quit their day jobs. Long-term loss of income has a cascading impact in areas such as medical benefits and retirement funds, not to mention a woman’s sense of autonomy, derived from financial independence. Further, a career supplies a woman with a measure of security for herself and her children in the event of unexpected sickness or divorce. As any woman who has tried knows, returning to the workforce and finding a well-paying job after an absence of years, or even decades, is difficult. Not so long ago mothers would pin a dollar bill to their daughters’ underclothes when they went out on a date in case, for some reason, they needed carfare home. Those mothers knew all to well that without money of your own it’s easy to be left stranded. As Bennetts expertly shows, it’s still true. - PW review

Bio: Leslie Bennetts has been a contributing writer at Vanity Fair since 1988, writing on subjects that have ranged from movie stars to U.S. anti-terrorism policy. Before joining that magazine, she was the first woman ever to cover a presidential campaign for The New York Times. Bennetts lives in New York City with her husband and their two children.

How much love is enough? What happened to the smiling mother who whipped up batches of cookies and kept a husband, house and home - all with an effortless smile? Does that woman exist anymore and was she the idyllic image of mom? What does it mean to be a good mother? Should every woman be a mother? Join us on Sunday, 5/27, as I chat live with critically acclaimed authors Sabina Murray, Elissa Schappell, Liesel Litzenburger and Victoria Redel as we discuss fractured families in contemporary literary fiction, emphasizing the bad mother. We’ll also discuss the boomer mother vs. today’s mom - issues, pressures, concerns, mom as best friend gone wrong (exhibit A: Lindsay Lohan) and what it means to be a good mother?click here to tune in this Sunday, 5/27 at 7PM est/4PM pst, or subscribe to my show with ITunes! Got a question for the authors about their work or anything in general? Feel free to leave your questions in the comments field and if we ask your question on the air, you’ll score a free book! After the jump, you’ll learn more about the books we’ll be discussing!
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Memoir. That word conjures words and elicits conversation: James Frey, unlimited access, trend, major book deals, alcoholic mothers and unavailable fathers, pretty girls who couldn’t fit into their Chloe jeans. Even though memoirs have been en vogue for recent years, writers have always been fixated on that one compelling subject: the self. Virginia Woolf claimed that a memoir is akin to a bowl that one keeps filling. And although there are a slew of popular, tragic memoirs regaling tales of the sorority girl gone wrong, there are countless complicated and compelling stories written by some of today’s most promising writers, whose memoirs start a dialogue beyond all the chatter mentioned above. Because although their story is their own, the subject matter: war, family and loss are words that people understand and can relate to. So a writer goes about their business, writing about a certain slice of their life and they see that novel through the business of publication.

But what happens after the final page has been written and subsequently read? Because although a life can be neatly packed into 300 odd pages of prose, a life off the page continues, and for the first three guests on my new radio show - BETWEEN THE SHEETS: WRITERS REVEALED - their memoir was only just the beginning.

On Sunday, May 20th, 7PM EST, I’ll be chatting with three authors: Maggie Nelson, Danielle Trussoni & Janice Erlbaum about what happens when the book tour is over and real life begins. Listen to their incredible stories about the events that happened after their books were written. Later this week, I’ll post links here to the show page on nowlive.com and widgets/buttons you can post on websites, etc. Meanwhile, I’m offering up 2 copies of Erlbaum’s Girlbomb, 2 copies of The Red Parts and 3 copies Trussoni’s Falling through the Earth to folks who leave questions for the authors in the comments section of this post. Do you have a question for one of the authors? All of them? Burning questions about memoirs, in general? Let me know what you’re thinking…The five questions I use will receive a copy of one of the books, gratis!

Now…on to the books…

BEYOND THE BOOK 5.20.07 7PM EST

MAGGIE NELSON, Author of Jane: A Murder & The Red Parts: One day in March 1969, twenty-three- year-old Jane Mixer was on her way home to tell her parents she was getting married. She had arranged for a ride through the campus bulletin board at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where she was one of a handful of pioneering women students at the law school. Her body was found the following morning just inside the gates of a small cemetery fourteen miles away, shot twice in the head and strangled. Six other young women were murdered around the same time, and it was assumed they had all been victims of alleged serial killer John Collins, who was convicted of one of these crimes not long after. Jane Mixer’s death was long considered to be one of the infamous Michigan Murders, as they had come to be known. But officially, Jane’s murder remained unsolved, and Maggie Nelson grew up haunted by the possibility that the killer of her mother’s sister was still at large. In an instance of remarkable serendipity, more than three decades later, a 2004 DNA match led to the arrest of a new suspect for Jane’s murder at precisely the same time that Nelson was set to publish a book of poetry about her aunt’s life and death. The Red Parts chronicles the uncanny series of events that led to Nelson’s interest in her aunt’s death, the reopening of the case, the bizarre and brutal trial that ensued, and the effects these events had on the disparate group of people they brought together.

The result is a stark, fiercely intelligent, and beautifully written memoir that poses vital questions about America’s complex relationship to spectacles of violence and suffering, and that scrupulously explores the limits and possibilities of honesty, grief, empathy, and justice.

Click here to read an Interview with Maggie Nelson

JANICE ERLBAUM, Author of Girlbomb: Erlbaum, a columnist for Bust, left her Manhattan home at 15 after her mother reunited with Erlbaum’s abusive stepfather. Landing first in a shelter and then a group home, Erlbaum—shattered by her mother’s choice—embarks on a treacherous course of self-destruction. Casual sex with a series of brutally uncaring boys coupled with daily drug and alcohol abuse become her antidote to the violence and racism in the child-welfare system housing her. Her isolation and loneliness threaten to swallow her whole. Yet when Erlbaum’s mother invites her home (the dreaded stepfather gone for good), things don’t improve. Erlbaum has more freedom, which allows more opportunity for trouble. At 17 she leaves again (this time to live with an older boyfriend), becomes addicted to the cocaine so plentiful in the 1980s New York club scene and nearly dies from an overdose. Through Erlbaum’s adolescence, she often seems a willing victim. In her chaotic senior year of high school, she begins writing stories, attempting to put the life she’s been living into perspective. Her memoir (comparable to Koren Zailckas’s Smashed) reads like a neorealist novel. Sharp yet poignant, raw and vivid, it illumines the dirty underside of American girlhood and brings it to harrowing life.
-Publisher’s Weekly Review

Click here to read an Interview with Janice Erlbaum

Click here to read an excerpt from Janice Erlbaum’s memoir

DANIELLE TRUSSONI, Author of Falling Through the Earth: From her father, Danielle Trussoni learned rock and roll, how to avoid the cops, and never to shy away from a fight. Growing up, she was fascinated by stories of his adventures as a tunnel rat in Vietnam, where he risked his life crawling headfirst into holes to search for American POWs held underground. Ultimately, Danielle came to believe that when the man she adored drank too much, beat up strangers, or mistreated her mother, it was because the horror of those tunnels still lived inside him. Eventually her mom gave up and left, taking all the kids except one: Danielle. When everyone else walked away and washed their hands of Dan Trussoni, Danielle would not. Now she tells their story.

As Danielle trails her father through nights at Roscoe’s Vogue Bar, scores of wild girlfriends, and years of bad dreams, a vivid and poignant portrait of a father-daughter relationship unlike any other emerges. Although the Trussonis are fiercely committed to each other, theirs is a love story filled with anger, stubbornness, outrageous behavior, and battle scars that never completely heal.

Click here to read an Interview with Danielle Trussoni