I remember vividly the day I got caught. It was during my first residency for my MFA in Creative Nonfiction. There I was, in my dorm room at Goucher College, arguing the finer points of narrative arcs and story complications and turning points, when my girlfriend, no doubt looking for a fine example to make her point, reached over, picked up a paperback book from the floor near my bed, and shrieked: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153How could you?!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d My deep dark secret had been discovered \u00e2\u20ac\u201c I liked to fall asleep reading \u00e2\u20ac\u0153junk,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d a\/k\/a dime-store novels or what some might call trashy novels, certainly nothing that qualifies as Literature and therefore not something that requires I pay much attention or recollect anything when I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m done. In fact, I remembered so little of these \u00e2\u20ac\u0153quick reads\u00e2\u20ac\u009d that too-often I purchased one only to find after the first chapter that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d read it before. <\/p>\n
OK, maybe I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m taking a little Frey-sian license here, as my memory of this event is not all that vivid \u00e2\u20ac\u201c I do not remember which book she discovered, or even who the author was (maybe Nora Roberts? I know it wan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t Danielle Steele). I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not even sure that she shrieked, although I am positive that she never let me forget about it\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6even to this day. <\/p>\n
So what brings on this memory this morning? It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Janet Maslin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s review in The New York Times, juxtaposing new books by Joann Harris (“Gentlemen & Players”) and Jackie Collins (\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Lovers & Players). \u00e2\u20ac\u0153In Playgrounds Tweedy or Seedy, It’s All in the Game\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (the article\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s title) Maslin says \u00e2\u20ac\u0153gamesmanship may be sexier than any of the above\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, where any of the above refers to such things as booty, politicking and name-dropping. <\/p>\n
I read one of Harris\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 books, “Chocolat,” and liked it (I also liked the movie), so I may well read this new one. I stopped reading Collins awhile back, so I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll pass on her latest. But don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t get the wrong idea about me. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m no more high-brow today than I was back then, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just that I traded in the bed-time paperbacks for one-hour tv-dramas, feeding my current addiction with CSI<\/em>, Law & Order<\/em>, Criminal Minds<\/em>, Numbers<\/em>, and, on the lighter side, Grey\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Anatomy<\/em>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I remember vividly the day I got caught. It was during my first residency for my MFA in Creative Nonfiction. There I was, in my dorm room at Goucher College, arguing the finer points of narrative arcs and story complications and turning points, when my girlfriend, no doubt looking for a fine example to make … Continue reading “Mia Culpa”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading-life"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.devradowrite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.devradowrite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.devradowrite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.devradowrite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.devradowrite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=253"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.devradowrite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.devradowrite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.devradowrite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.devradowrite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}