My review, from the Sunday Oregonian. A clip:

Let us talk about deeply imagined fiction, Mary Gaitskill's "Veronica" and the stories of Paul Bowles and now Peter Rock's "The Shelter Cycle," books that follow no familiar path; which have their own logic and music and jags that can leave the reader feeling strapped to the back of a toboggan, on a journey to who knows where, watch that turn! Feeling just on the edge of trusting the author is going to get us out alive, get this story birthed, maybe in the middle of a forest in the snow, a metaphor and actual location for the book in question.

Rock reads tonight from the book, at Powell's City of Books, at 7:30pm

I was on eBay yesterday looking to buy, for an upcoming trip to Maui, a Lilly Pulitzer dress. I love her work and have been wearing it since I was a teenager and found a pretty little halter dress at a junky thrift shop in Vineyard Haven. It was the perfect summer dress, made of t-shirt cotton, no zipper, you just tied it at the neck and you were done, you didn't even need a bra because the way the seams were sewn took care of that. This was of course no accident. I wore the dress every summer for twenty years, until it disappeared, and now have just one Lilly piece, an A-line skirt with a sea turtle print, also perfect, also immensely flattering, which all her vintage pieces are. She understood: you want to get dressed, you want to look pretty (and be able to run in your clothes of you want to), and think about it no more. RIP, Lilly Pulitzer, and thank you.

About a decade after a woman gives birth to a girl, she begins to know exponentially and unequivocally less about fashion than her daughter. I’m not talking about (what are for me) the classics; I’ve got a DVF wrap dress, a half-dozen Betsey Johnsons, and at 30 paces can peg the best polyester hostess gown in Goodwill. I mean what’s going on now: When did acid-washed jeans become “sand-blasted,” and what’s up with all the denim, anyway? Is Lenny Kravitz to blame for oversize accessories? Are we on the 67th or 76th resurrection of the peasant blouse? How would I know? Like realizing I haven’t read the last Amis book when the next is being reviewed, at a certain point I simply stopped trying to keep apace. I chalk up my befuddlement, and my 12-year-old daughter’s concurrent awareness, to some shark-like sartorial survival gene that needs to keep moving if it’s to stay alive. While Tafv likes wearing my Emilio Pucci nightgowns (which I inherited from my mother), she’ll also shoot me looks of abject terror when I try on old outfits I think still work.

“No, Mama, you can’t!” she’ll shriek, tossing the blouse with the ruched sleeves back in the closet.

“But I wore that when I was pregnant with you . . .”

“Mama!”

Embarrassment factor for Tafv if I wear the blouse: 704. Luckily, I still understand humiliation. And so, while it may be true that I was stranded in the fashion undertow two years ago, I also unwittingly did something brilliant...

Read the rest on Medium.com

Our literary landscape is littered with the remains of writers whose careers as reporters, memoirists and even novelists have proven to be fabricated. Is it ever okay for a writer to tell a lie? We look into the question here.

It was 3:14 in the morning. She couldn't sleep. She gathered her things in the dark--water bottle, iPad--and tripped on her shoes on the way to the spare bedroom. She didn't want to read the book(s) she was in the middle of. What had she read earlier on her pal David Wolman's page? Something about the sinking of a WW II ship...

And so she bought it, with 1-click. Her face was lit by the moony glow of the screen as she read IN HARM'S WAY: The Sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of its Survivors, captivated by passages like:

Before being assigned to the Indy, in November 1944, McCoy had spent two months as part of a marine assault on the island of Peleliu, a hellish, confusing place where he contracted malaria. The fighting had been vicious, and often it was hand to hand. The dead bodies piled up around McCoy and would hiss and explode in the sun as he hunkered in the mud and coral, praying the mortars would miss him.

And she realized she had found her genre book, war history. And she wondered who was with her, and what they recommend.

My first book review for the Wall Street Journal is online, and in the print edition tomorrow, May 22. I am so pleased about writing for the WSJ, an idea I had about six weeks ago, asking a friend on-staff for an introduction. The editor suggested three books, all of which were bull's eyes.

The lede:

J. Paul Getty III and Charles Fox met for the last time over lunch in 2001. Both men were confined to wheelchairs: Fox from multiple sclerosis, Getty from a 1981 drug-overdose-induced stroke that left him paralyzed and nearly blind at the age of 25. They sat by the swimming pool of Getty's Hollywood estate, the air hot and "jasmine-scented," as Getty's former wife, his mother and various people tended him. Though Getty communicated only in "small, indecipherable clicks," one of the entourage translated for Fox: "He says he wants you to write his story."

Read the whole thing here.

I posted a new essay on Medium.com, Advice to a Young Freelancer. Sample Q & A:

How do you find your stories?

I sometimes find story ideas in the Metro section of the newspaper, one-inch items with headlines like, “Man Nails Girlfriend’s Fish to Floor.” The short-shrift given to these stories will spark my wondering, what is this about? Usually the story doesn’t make complete sense; I want to look more deeply. I wrote about mushroom foragers in Alaska after reading one line about them in Bon Appetit. The reference started an itch that I needed to scratch; the scratch bloomed to a topic, the topic to a pitch, the pitch to a story. Follow that itch.

I am loving Medium.com, and am grateful to Hillary Johnson for the invitation, and for her brilliant essays, and for the Dymaxicon collection she built on Medium, as captivating to me as the grand department stores of my New York City childhood, the ceilings so high, and everything gleaming, perfumes and gossamar scarves and brass elevators going up.

Journalist David Hochman has kindly asked me to be his guest tonight on Upod Academy's interview series.

Tonight's event: Finding Stories Only You Can Tell (And Sell): Getting Personal with Nancy Rommelmann, wherein we will talk about journalism and I will be asked questions. I am eagerly cribbing for you, so listen in tonight, May 23, from 7-9pm PST. Details on the Upod site.

photo by Virginia Lee Hunter, taken while we were working on a story about Slab City

A tip for all you would-be entrepreneurs: a successful business is a constantly shifting amoeba. The movement can be terrifying (holy shit! what is it doing now?! and why?!) but mostly it is fascinating and thrilling. You wind up wanting to watch it, interact with it, to poke it and stroke it, like a baby. That Din is builing this business, with my help and with the involvement and sweat and love and ideas and mutual mini-meltdowns of so many, and to see where we are, it is fantastic. So grateful. Viva Ristretto - the new cafe to be born next week xx

I came home from walking Wales two weeks ago today. It was an astounding trip in every way, the landscape -- walking the Pembrokeshire Coast Trail, above and alongside the sea - was so beautiful as to be surreal, the people lovely (I especially like that every Welshman calls every woman, "Love"), and the company, Deborah Reed, the very very best. I do not exaggerate when I say we laughed for hours every day, and have a meeting of the mind and heart in ways seldom found. I adore her forever. Bonus: she introduced to Helen Smith, who was the very best hostess, putting us up in her lovely home in London, where we ate and drank and gabbed and dried our dirty hiking clothes outside on the line, after washing them in Persil, which smells so wonderful I am considering having some shipped from the UK.

When I arrived home, Din said, "I need to get away for a few days." I had barely landed when we were taking off this past Tuesday for Las Vegas, a quick trip bought on Hotwire for a ridiculously low price. The hotel, the Vdara, has no casino and thus is calm and quiet. Perhaps because it was a Tuesday, the gal at the lobby desk upped our room to an executive suite, essentially, an apartment, with a kitchen, a washer/dryer, and two bathrooms, one about as large as a New York City studio. From the bathtub, one can look over the city and to the mountains, which I did, not caring if people in the high-rises next door could see me naked.

"Who cares?" said Din. "People are funny about that stuff."

"Exactly," I said. "It's not like they haven't seen breasts in Vegas."

"Well, not real ones," he said.

We did see many unreal ones, including a pair, on a linebacker-shaped woman, so large they were crowding up into her neck. We saw her on one of our several walks along the strip, walks that are accomplished these days along a series of walkways connecting the casinos and malls, walkways crammed with people taking pictures and other people selling water, with people scavenging for change and other people playing violin for same; people handing out nudie flyers and working girls and girls dressed as working girls and tourists drinking drinks out of 24-inch colored plastic cups shaped like phalluses. There are many languages being spoken as from every wall ads flash for shows and luxury goods and loose slots and big steaks. Every building's surface is plastered with a famous someone's face, 70-feet of Gordon Ramsay, Donnie & Marie, Celine. There were no birds anywhere. There are many homeless, some of the men looking like castaways. And every few yards there is the smell of sewage, drifting up from the sidewalk in hot waves, bathing you, coating you, so that you soon feel you have been rolled in the sweat of others, and even the swimming pool offers little refreshment, because in the pool are dozens of people, drinking the big drinks and farting out the buffet they ate for dinner and the other one they had for breakfast.

We had buffet too, once. It came with the room. I advise against it.

So much for the icky part. There is also the beauty, of downtown Las Vegas, in the process of being revitalized by Zappo's Tony Hsieh. We ate at Eat, and it's wonderful. Ditto, La Comida. We saw my beautiful former sister-in-law Sandra and her husband, and had a very good meal at Lotus of Siam, and yesterday, met Rodney Muirhead and Elizabeth Montes for lunch at Milo's, in the Cosmopolitan. Get the Greek yogurt dessert, which is not like the Greek yogurt you get at the market, it's so extraordinary we all spooned and oohed and aahed and made the waiter tell us where it's from: Four Brothers. This, too, is something I am considering having shipped in.

The best thing about being in Las Vegas was being with Din; that is always the case anywhere and every day. The second best thing were the motels on East Fremont. 

Ten years ago today, Din and I woke up, made coffee, spent the morning with Tafv, my best friend Sarah, and three friends who'd come down from San Francisco. One had rented a Lincoln for the day. We drove to Beverly Hills City Hall, Din wearing a suit of my dad's he'd had tailored to fit, me in a $2 suit I'd bought at Ozzie Dots the year before just because I liked it.  I pinned on the gardenia Din had bought me. We walked into the marrying room and, holding hands, were given a sober, lively, very short talking to by a very short judge sitting at her desk. Did we take what we were doing seriously? We did, of course we did, though to characterize marriage as a serious business does not speak to what my experience of marriage is, which all has to do with this man, oh this man. Who I knew six weeks into knowing him was the only one for me. 

I woke up today and made coffee. Happy anniversary, my love xx

THE MARRYING ROOM (LA Weekly, June 2003)

I woke up last Thursday morning and asked Din, my boyfriend of six years, if he wanted to get married that day.

He laughed. “Can I finish my cup of coffee first?”

While he did that, I went online and found the nearest city hall; Beverly Hills performed marriages on Thursdays, but they didn’t have any openings that day.

“Let’s go get the license, anyway,” I said.

We drove to the big, pretty police station on Santa Monica and Rexford, and parked behind it. On the walk to the registrar, we started a discussion about how women manipulate men, when it comes to marrying.

“All women?” I asked.

“Just about,” said Din, pulling open the heavy door to City Hall. The ceilings were high, the floors marble, the light green and governmental. We passed through the metal detectors and waited near a bank of tellers’ windows, where three couples were filling out paperwork.

“What about her?” I whispered, nodding at a slender woman in pressed jeans, saying something clipped to her groom, who turned to look out the glass doors.

“She’s been busting his balls for 14 months, and now the fun’s really going to begin,” Din whispered back.

I laughed, but I couldn’t keep up the cynicism — the other couples appeared goofy with love. A man in his 50s in ratty sweatpants lunged for a kiss from his bride-to-be as they were handed their license. A very tall man dressed like an East Coast banker could not stop grinning as his fiancée, in a lovely Liberty of London shift, silently moved her lips as she read the questions.

“I’m not a ball-buster,” I told Din.

“Well, I know that,” he said, and kissed my hair.

Another couple seemed to blow in on a gust of air. He looked like NBA champ Steve Kerr, with a yarmulke; she had an open face, great glasses and a head scarf.

“Look at all these people getting married. It’s so hopeful,” she said to the room. I responded by telling her she needed to get a form from the center basket.

“Thank you, THANK you,” she said.

Din and I filled out our form and turned it in to a clerk with a Brooklyn accent (“You can make it out to me,” he cracked, when I asked how to make out the $67 check). Then we moved to the waiting area, a gem of 1930s modernism, with one large table and benches along three walls, where waiting couples sat, staring at one another. I felt as though I were filling up with helium.

“Din and Nancy?” called the clerk. We proceeded to the window. “Raise your right hands.”

We complied. “Do you swear the information on this license” — which had been typed and now looked as official and permanent as a birth certificate — “is the truth?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I do,” said Din.

“. . . I do,” I added.

“Okay, that’s it. Are there any questions I can answer for you?”

“Yes, where do we get married?” I asked.

“You can’t do it today,” he said, and then, to the crabby female clerk next to him, “We’re not going to have an angry day, are we?”

“I know, I know,” I said, “but for when we come back.”

He pointed left. “Down the hall, the door where the bell is.”

As Din slid the license into its envelope, I heard head-scarf gal say to the clerk, “You help marry people. It’s SUCH a wonderful thing.”

“Yeah, it’s a wonderful thingamajig. Next!”

Din and I found the marrying room — the bell was made of honeycombed paper. Inside, sweatpants man and his bride stood before a man in a purple-and-magenta satin robe. The room was small, no space for froufrou, and I felt, at that second, as though I had opened a closet and seen a jacket I’d forgotten about, then put it on, and it fit exactly.

Sweatpants caught me peeping. “Come in, come in!” he said, holding open the door. I stammered that I was just looking, for when we get married.

The man in the robe looked puzzled. “You’re not getting married today?”

“No, no,” I said, “but for when we do.”

“Oh,” he said, and grinned. “Well, be sure to call, so I know not to be here.”

This was getting better and better.

I backed into the hall, where Din and a secretary were laughing. What?

“She was just commenting on what he wore to get married in,” said Din.

“I know, but he was so happy,” I said, and then we left City Hall, discussing what we would wear.

Just today found out the names of all four of mine: Maria, Maria, Mae and Cleopatra. Previously knew each except for Mae, which is Tafv's middle name. I was supposed to be named Maria, but as the story goes, my father came into the hospital room to see my mother and said, "I just saw Maria in the nursery -- she's beautiful," upon which my mother burst into tears and said, "I want to name her Nancy!" This, because she said every Nancy she knew in grade school was so nice.

What are the names of yours? 

I did something I had never done before last night: I went on Goodreads and saw what readers had written about my work. I did not go onto the site with the intention of doing this. I went to see what readers thought of Terrence Holt's In the Valley of the Kings, which I had just reviewed on Amazon, where I was surprised to see, because I think the book so tremendous, how few readers had reviewed it. If you have not read it, I highly recommend it.

But that's me. Seeing what readers wrote about The Bad Mother, I know we all see things differently--and viva for that. (I will, if you will indulge me, point out to reviewer #1 that the title does not refer to any of the novel's human characters, but to Hollywood herself.) 

Somewhat earlier in the evening, I had seen a review on Amazon for Transportation. It came from a friend. The generosity of what he wrote caught me up short. I emailed him, trying to say thank you, and wound up writing that what he'd posted had rendered me inarticulate, and hopefully that was termporary, but that the effect was it made me want to write more and write better. He responded with more kindness, including the mention of Roberto Bolano, whose 2666 has been sitting at my bedside for six months. Because I was in that mood, I checked what reviews the book had received on Amazon. They were mixed. I started the book last night...

... and was up at five this morning, reading, with a cup of coffee, then two, it was getting on 7:30, I really should have started my day, but my god, this book, this book! This writing, mind-blowingly great, funny, only its own, so smart, oh for days with no interruption, just this book and me, this book that reviewers find confusing, and which, as I raced through a four-page-with-no-period sentence, as I fell into world after world of this story, I was so joyful at knowing that Bolano had found the editors he did, if finally; that the work could come to us without being squashed, that translators had done their amazing job, at the horizons smashed out between yesterday and today. 

Din and I moved, from LA to Portland (where he was born and raised) in 2004. He'd been working as a paitning contractor for the previous six years. This was not something he wanted to continue. And so in the fall, I asked him, "What do you want to do?"

"Roast coffee," he said, which he'd been doing at home for the past four years, small batches that friends snatched up and oohed and aahed over.

Ristretto Roasters was born in 2005.

"Since then, Ristretto has grown from boutique cafe with an on-site vintage roaster into a thriving business with an independent roastery and coffee lab, and three architecturally distinctive and popular cafes in urban Portland." So reads Din's bio, in HOW TO MAKE COFFEE BEFORE YOU'VE HAD COFFEE, Ristretto Roasters' Spectacularly Simple Guide to Brewing at Home, which came out yesterday. As I've told others, the book looks great and shoots straught, just like my husband. You can grab it on Amazon, or, starting next week, at the cafes and Powell's Books. Enjoy xx

I've been remiss around these parts and have not been posting links to my new favorite gig: reviewing books for the Wall Street Journal. I have one in this weekend, THE MUSHROOM HUNTERS: On the Trail of an Underground America, by Langdon Cook. The Journal is behind a paywall so if you are not a WSJ subscriber you may not get the whole article. Here's the lede:

Those morels at Whole Foods, the ones that sell for more money than you feel like spending, despite their crenelated conical umami goodness: Ever wonder how they got to the market?

If they came from the Northwest—and there's a good chance they did—they were foraged by circuit pickers who work seasonally in forests from California to Alaska. The crews, often Southeast Asian refugees, sell the morels to a buyer working out of a truck or a tent or other temporary shelter. He pays cash.Once the buyer has got, say, 2,000 pounds, he has to get the morels out of the backcountry fast. Wild mushrooms are highly perishable, their quality easily compromised by rot, heat, bugs, crushing. Which means that after days of haggling, of being cold and damp or hot and sweaty—and, if it is summer in Alaska, fighting swarms of mosquitoes dense as beaded curtains—the buyer suddenly needs to hustle. Maybe it's an all-night drive to a prop plane or floating downriver on a raft or begging a helicopter ride, anything that will get the morels to Los Angeles and New York, where 24 hours after being picked, they are displayed for sale on a bed of froufrou ferns.

At age 21, just starting to see her work published, wanting it so very much while also wanting to please God, to do as He wanted, Flannery O'Connor wrote to Him. From one of her journal entries: 

Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and my self is the earth’s shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon. The crescent is very beautiful and perhaps that is all one like I am should or could see; but what I am afraid of, dear God, is that my self shadow will grow so large that it blocks the whole moon, and that I will judge myself by the shadow that is nothing. . . .

The rest in this week's New Yorker.

Today, on New York Magazine's Grub Street blog. And Ristretto makes the list, mais oui. And check out that photo of the hot owner... 

... who wrote a book so you can make spectacular coffee. Now on Kindle, too xx