Book club meeting

The night before last I drove out to one of the suburbs because I'd been invited to be the guest at a book club discussing The Wild Swans. This was fun; I've done it before. I was prey to my usual anxieties that a) I wouldn't be able to find the address and b) I would talk too much. I did find the address--although I feared I was lost at one point and almost turned around--and I was on time for the meeting. And perhaps I did talk too much, but the book club didn't seem to mind and asked many questions. I asked my usual questions of them in return. As I have come to learn, the fairy tale "The Wild Swans" isn't as well known as I had thought it was when I started writing the book, and several of them had never encountered it before. Not all the parallels that I'd attempted to draw were seen by the readers in this group, either, i.e., Bill is William's doppelganger, Patty is Patience's, and the nettle coats = the squares of the AIDS Quilt. One reader figured things out about William rather quickly, but for the rest, the truth was revealed to them in the gaol scene, at the same time that William figured it out himself. I've had a range of responses from readers on that one, and so it sounded about right.

Discussion was lively and lasted until 10:00. As a thank you gift, they presented me with a little book, Cicely Mary Barker's Flower Fairies of the Spring, and a little fairy statuette.

I do enjoy doing book club meetings.

Home yesterday

because Delia had a croupy cough and a fever. She still has the croupy cough today but no fever, so we ruthlessly sent her back to school and I'm back at work.

Tomorrow the dumpster is delivered.

Am absurdly nervous about the whole thing.

Guessing Game

I am about 180 pages into A.S. Byatt's Possession (that is, about 1/3 of the way in). Were I to hazard a guess about the outcome of this book, I would suggest that Mortimer Cropper will end up possessing the letters.

We'll see if I turn out to be right.

Dusting off my hat

I had a Greek fisherman's cap which I wore obsessively when I was running around Europe with a backpack in 1982. I haven't worn it much since, and it has sat on a shelf and gathered quite a bit of dust. While sorting through things, it occurred to me that now that my hair is short, the cap would look well on me. And it does.

I do believe I shall start wearing it again.