How I Stalked Frank McCourt
A struggling writer plays and eventually wins the ‘blurb game’ for his memoir
By Jeff Nichols
In 1995, my goal was simple: to become the toast of the New York literary town. So I began to scribble down my autobiography. I thought I had an interesting story about being confined to special education, the obligatory drug and alcohol abuse and then going on to live a life full of “fish out of water” situations.
I rushed the first draft and sent it off to some literary agents. One guy told a friend of mine that the book was so bad it should be renamed “My life as an Idoit.” I loved it, and immediately added it as a subtitle to my book.
Oblivious, I felt that if I could get a forward or blurb from a famous writer or media personality, it would help me get in the door with some publishers. I had met Molly Jong-Fast at a party in Manhattan. Molly was/is a writer and a Manhattan socialite who was friends with many writers. More importantly, Molly’s mother, Erica Jong, was one of the pioneers of women’s literature in America.
When Molly said she would be glad to “look at it,” I started dumping heaps of typo-ridden manuscripts off with her doorman. Then I would call to see if she had read it; I always got the answering machine: “Hi, Molly, Jeff Nichols here. Look, I don’t know if you picked up my manuscript yet with your doorman, but if you have read up to page 130, don’t read anymore. I changed pages 135 to 155, beefed it up a little. Anyway, I have dropped those revised chapters off with your doorman, hope I caught you in time.” Eventually I realized Molly was not going to read my horrific book.
But my ace in the hole was a Pulitzer Prize-winner and author of one of the bestselling books of all time: Angela’s Ashes. This would be tricky because my connection to Frank McCourt—my stepfather—could also be my obstacle. I sank my stepfather’s large fishing boat and accidently burnt his house down to the ground, among other injustices. A decent guy with a big heart, he handled it better than anyone would.
My mother, always the insufferable cheerleader, must have wrestled Frank’s number from my stepfather, and I got the old “I’ll have a look at it” from Frank.
I began to stalk Frank the same way some creep would stalk Pamela Anderson. I did everything but rifle through Frank’s garbage. Time passed. I found out that a golf club in the Hamptons was having a tournament in Frank’s honor. I caught him right before he teed off. Throwing caution to the wind, I walked up and said, “Frank, I am Jeff Nichols, Cynthia Nichols’ son.”
In his wonderful brogue, he looked up at me and said, “Oh, I know who you are, and let me tell ya, I am not writing any (expletive) forward for you book!”
Horrified that I had upset this wonderful man, I stepped back in genuine concern and horror.
“Oh no, you don’t have to. I am a big fan, no problem,” I said.
Then Frank, possibly picking up on my earnestness and latent empathy added, “But I might give you a burb.”
Two years later, Jeff’s book was made into a major movie. His book, Trainwreck: My Life as an Idoit, was published by Simon and Schuster with Frank’s blurb on the front cover. For more information, visit www.jeff-nichols.com.
Breaking Up Is Hard To Do
How I finally kicked my decades-long nicotine habit
“Don’t you want to be alive to dance at my wedding someday?” asked my 18-year-old son, Brett.
My husband and I were up in Cambridge for the first parents’ college weekend. Brett was apparently majoring in Jewish guilt at Harvard. “How can a mother possibly reply to that question?” I thought as I reluctantly snuffed out the cigarette I was smoking. Read more
Manhattan Moolah
When paying it forward pays off
By Sarah Elder
Money may not grow on trees, but in Manhattan I keep finding it at my feet.
A native Californian, I now live and work on the Upper West Side as a full-time nanny. My workday is spent pushing a bright pink stroller, passing strangers I will probably never meet.
Still, I didn’t give a second thought to helping a high school kid who dropped a $10 bill on the ground while strutting to his headphones. I picked it up and ran down the block after him, the baby shouting, “Faster, faster!” as I tried to catch up. Read more
Tuesdays at The Met
Opera buffs share a slice of life while queuing up for tickets
By Lucas Corcoran
My father and I have started a new tradition: Tuesdays at the Metropolitan Opera. In order to support such a lavish habit, we have taken advantage of the Agnes Varis and Karl Leichtman Rush Tickets program, which provides 200 orchestra seats at a mere $20 a ticket.
As would be expected, such an offer attracts hordes of New Yorkers, with the most resolute opera fans arriving as early as 10 a.m. to assure their place in line. The line itself is quite a scene, a miniature New York, complete with eccentrics, local politics and plenty of kibitzing. Read more
How to Putter
Seven steps to unwind your mind at week’s end
By Mat Zucker
My partner Bryan surprised me this year with a very thoughtful Hannukah gift: a gray velour Ralph Lauren tracksuit.
This luxurious outfit, however, is not for jogging on the treadmill; in fact, the soft, thick fabric and sagging lines suggest the very opposite of physical activity. Bryan was instead recognizing my favorite weekend ritual: puttering around the house.
To be clear, puttering is not about being lazy, nor is it “dawdling,” which is about delaying something you should do. To putter is to move aimlessly, usually indoors. We zone out much like we’re stoned, but are in motion and vaguely productive. Read more
Monday Morning Football Flashback
My brush with an NFL hall of famer
By Rosemary Kalikow
My only son announced that Jerry Rice will be voted into the upcoming 2010 Hall of Fame Class during Super Bowl weekend. He specifically relayed this factoid to me because he knows that Rice will always hold a special place in my heart—not because of his maneuvers on the football field, but because of his special play on Columbus Avenue.
In 1994, I was one of five female producers at Live with Regis & Kathie Lee. Regis would often come into our meeting and request a specific guest, always a sports star. I consistently volunteered to take the assignment because the other female producers had no idea who he was talking about. Read more
Those Ubiquitous Scaffolds
And what one Upper West Sider actually loves about them
By Chuck Pagano
We’re a subterranean lot, us New Yorkers. Not by choice, like mole people or Minnesotans, but by necessity: The subway is the easiest, fastest and cheapest way to get from A to B. Hence, we spend a lot of time underground—waiting for trains, riding trains, throwing momma from trains.
The last thing we want when we surface is to feel like we’re still down below. But, thanks to the ever-present scaffolding blighting our sidewalks, the city often feels like one long tunnel. The line between below ground and above ground—which used to be the sidewalk—is blurred. Read more
A Frank Memoir
One colleague’s fond recollections
By Tom Allon
“When I look back on our teaching days I wonder how we managed to survive at all. It was of course, a miserable career: the happy career is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable teaching career is the miserable high school teaching career, and worse yet is the miserable New York public high school teaching career.”
This is how I’d imagine a Frank McCourt memoir about our teaching days together at Stuyvesant High School might begin. Read more
Three-Ring Binder
Learning how to step out when your kids take ownership of their education
By Nancy J. Brandwein
My 13-year-old son is pressing me to get him a new three-ring binder. I see this as a positive sign that he cares about his schoolwork, that he no longer sees sloppiness as something either uncontrollable or as a virtue—his own eccentric quirk. His cracking binder is stuffed full of every single paper, every worksheet, every test of the first half of his 7th grade year at a New York City public school.
The need for his new binder is also testament to the demise of the textbook. In social studies, in science, in Spanish, for reasons both financial and ideological, the school he attends hands out Xeroxed worksheets, Xeroxed pages of textbooks and websites, and somehow my son’s 7th grade brain, three-quarters of which is taken up with inchoate longings and Gary Larson cartoons, is meant to organize the scattered pages of information into a coherent whole.
I’m afraid to ask my son what he understands about Boyle’s Law, the Civil War draft riots or the conjugation of certain Spanish irregular verbs. Without the plodding linearity of the textbook to organize his thoughts on these topics, I wonder how he copes with the accretion of information from all these loose-leaf pages. It is only in math that he has a textbook, one that weighs about 50 pounds, and only in that topic, perhaps fittingly, that we see a progression from point A to point B. When he came home with a math textbook in the first week of 6th grade, he was ecstatic. He told us, not once but thrice, that if he got so much as a pencil scratch on its pages we would have to pay the school $50. It was then I realized, sadly, that he’d never had a textbook in all the years of grade school.
I fondly remember some of the textbooks I had while attending school in Northern Virginia in the 1960s. Most of all, I loved my 4th grade Virginia history textbook with its delicate painting of Gunston Hall in shades of pale pink, yellow and Wedgwood blue. In its creamy pages, I read the story of the Lost Colony and saw an illustration of the colonists looking at the mysterious word, “Croatan,” carved in the tree. My 4th grade English grammar textbook was filled with sentences parsed in patterns that looked like flight plans or football plays. And there were science textbooks with diagrams of electrical circuits and wind currents and experiments in shaded boxes. Yet, for all the textbooks I toted home, along with my groovy denim covered three-ring binder with its jean pocket on the cover, it’s hard to remember what I learned, especially in 7th grade. Somehow, one almost feels like at a certain point, after you’ve gotten the basics down, school is beside the point.
The point is that my son, by asking, well, actually, begging, for a new three-ring binder—and also by refusing to weed out ANY papers from his old stuffed one—is taking ownership of his education. I can imagine how he will painstakingly transfer each page into the new binder. For the pages in which the holes are ripped, my son might stick on a tiny white donut-shaped “reinforcement,” a touching remnant from my childhood, along with the satisfying manila dividers with their clear-colored cellophane tabs.
Yet, as my son goes about his ritual of transplanting papers into a new three-ring binder, I need to use mental “dividers” and separate my own nostalgia from the reality of my children’s school life, a life that is almost totally hidden from me. I must come to terms with the fact that just as my son’s and my 9-year-old daughter’s childhoods are theirs, with their play dates and schedules rather than my 1960s devil-may-care existence, so is their schooling, with its reliance on hyperlinks and idea webs rather than encyclopedias and sentence diagrams.
I know now it is a violation to do what I used to when my son was in 6th grade: take the loose papers he had left on the floor or dining room table and put them into his binder with a satisfying snap of the metal rings.
“Mom, where’s my math test???” “It goes in the pocket,” he would complain. Or, “The Spanish worksheet goes in my folder since we’re still doing it.”
Butt out, Mom.
My 4th grader daughter means this, too, when I try to clean out her red vinyl homework folder.
“Why do you have math worksheets from a week ago in here?” “Why do you have this ELA test reading about a ham radio? You already HAD the test?” I ask her, on my way to the recycling stack.
“Nooooo,” she protests. Somehow, in all the numbing boredom of the ELA test prep, which she complained bitterly about for weeks, she has cottoned on to the excitement of owning a Ham radio—two words I hadn’t heard joined together since my own childhood.
“We have to keep this,” she says, and snatches the paper from my hand.
“Mom, can we get a ham radio? Can we? Can we?” my daughter asks me this as we are out the door on the way to school, her heavy backpack filled with library books, lunch, water bottle, folders and composition books.
Like the word “Croatan” carved on a tree, the one true thing etched in my brain from that entire Virginia history textbook, she has picked up a signal in the static of worksheets, test prep and workbooks. She doesn’t quite know what it means, but it’s lighting up a circuit in her brain. And that’s enough.
Nancy J. Brandwein is a freelance writer and editor who has had essays published in The New York Times, Brain, Child and West Side Spirit and Our Town, where she is a featured contributor for her weekly “Snack Attack” column.
IN WITH THE NEW, OUT WITH THE OLD
WHEN EXTRACTING AN AGED COUCH FROM YOUR WEST SIDE APARTMENT ISN’T AS EASY AS IT SEEMS
By F. Diane Barth
Spending money these days is conflict filled, to say the least. However, my husband and I decided that the purchase of a new couch for our living room would be both reasonable and our contribution to the drooping economy. The piece of furniture to be replaced had served us for more than 20 years, having survived bouncing children, spilled juice and, as our guest bed, more sleeping bodies than we wanted to remember. Our only child having recently departed for college, we wanted to feather our empty nest with something a little less adolescent friendly—and besides, our most recent houseguest had gently mentioned something about sagging springs. Read more
