What’s not to love about J.K. Rowling?

The best-selling, mega-successful author of the Harry Potter series has always been a winner with the public. She’s wise…she’s modest…she’s even funny. (If you’ve never heard her commencement speech at Harvard University a couple of years back, drop whatever you’re doing and listen to this…)!

But most of all, I think we all deeply respect and revere this one-time-welfare-mom who decided one day in her mid-30s while working as a divorced secretary that she would take a chance on a dream and create what would eventually become the first of a series of books that has defined a generation.

But Rowling outdid herself this past weekend when it was revealed that she had secretly written a crime novel under the male pseudonym of Robert Galbraith, a (purported) first-time novelist. The book, The Cuckoo’s Calling, had opened to high critical praise when it was published in April, but had failed to attract much in the way of commercial success, selling but 1,500 copies.

Until now. Within hours of the revelation that Rowling was the actual author (an editor at Britain’s Sunday Times was the sleuth), the book rocketed to top the Amazon best-seller charts.

Read the rest of this post at The Broad Side...

Image: 100405_EasterEggRoll_682 by Daniel Ogren via Flickr under a Creative Commons License

As a denizen of North London lo’ these past five and a half years, I’ve had my fair share of celebrity sightings. I’ve caught a glimpse of chef Boy Wonder Jamie Oliver as he entered a local bookstore. I’ve exchanged a few pleasantries with actress Helena Bonham Carter. I’ve even locked eyes with comedian Ricky Gervais at the hair dresser’s.

But by far the most exciting celebrity encounter to date was this week, when I attended a Q and A with author George R.R. Martin.

Martin — or GRRM as he’s known to fans — is the writer of the best-selling fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire, on which the hugely popular HBO television series, Game of Thrones, is based. If you haven’t read the books — and you really should — they are famous for their unbelievably graphic and realistic depiction of medieval life, replete with internecine power struggles between warring clans, routine war crimes of the most vicious sort and, yes, quite a bit of sex. The net effect, as many have observed, is a good deal closer to history than fantasy.

I myself am not normally a fantasy reader. I came to these books via my 11 year-old son who, like many fans, literally counted down the nights until last summer’s release of the fifth volume in the series — A Dance With Dragons . (Yeah, I know. Please don’t ask. He was 4,000 pages in before I realized that the books might not be appropriate.) But at my son’s insistence, I immersed myself in Martin’s Kingdom of Westeros and its more than 1,000 characters and have never looked back. So when I saw that Martin would be giving a talk at a local University theatre, I ran to get us some tickets.

He did not disappoint.

Read the rest of this post at The Washington Post’s She The People blog…

Image: George R.R. Martin, author of Game of Thrones by Arnold Tijerina via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

Every Wednesday I offer tips for adulthood.

I read a great post yesterday on the Online magazine The Tribe about why adults ought to read more children’s books. The author argues that great children’s books share much in common with great adult books in terms of plot, character and pacing. The difference is that because the authors are aware of the fickle attention spans of their target audiences (e.g., kids), they try that much harder to reel you in.

This wasn’t the first time I’d heard this point of view. A year or so ago, Pamela Paul took to the pages of the New York Times to talk about the rising popularity of kidlit among adult readers.

I’m currently undergoing a variation on this theme myself:  at my 11 year-old’s urging, I’m reading the first book in George R.R. Martin’s wildly successful fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire.

Yeah, I know. A lot of people don’t think of this as “kid lit,” though I think it’s reasonable to describe it as cross-over fare aimed at both teens and adults.  I also know that some parents will want to haul me into social services for letting my (then ten-year old) read this stuff, especially if they’ve seen the HBO series, Game of Thrones, based on the first novel. (I haven’t.)

But for me, this is about as close as I get to children’s fiction.

Let me say up front that I’m soooo *not* your typical fantasy fiction reader. As with my taste in films, I tend towards the irrepressibly realistic (some would say dire.)

But I’m loving A Game of Thrones and here’s why  – if you haven’t already tried it – you should also give it a go:

1. It’s realistic. If you’re like me, when you hear the term “fantasy fiction” you immediately conjure up maps of countries that don’t exist, an array of dungeons and dragons and – as a wanna-be fantasy writing friend of mine put it so aptly – “animals that talk.” All of this can be found in Martin’s kingdom of Westeros. But as anyone who has read his novels knows, what makes them stand out is how utterly realistic they are. Sure there’s a demonic human being known as “the hound,” a whole lot of sword-fighting, and some kind of evil monster-like species I haven’t quite yet sussed out that doesn’t bleed. But what really pulls the reader in is the feeling that – as in the modern world: actions have consequences. As one reviewer put it in The New York Times, “When people are stabbed, they die; when kingdoms ignore debts, the bankers show up. The characters understand their world, and we understand the characters.”

2. It’s historically grounded. A lot of that realism flows from the fact that the book at times reads more like history than it does fantasy. There are literally more than a thousand characters in the series and Martin helpfully adds an appendix to the end of the first book so that you can figure out how the different clans relate to one another. The net effect is not dissimilar to reading something like Hillary Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall, in that you feel like you’re reading a fictional account of the internecine struggles among the factions in a real kingdom. Martin himself has allowed that he was frustrated with a lot of the post-Tolkien fantasy literature because it was so often grounded in a kind of “Disneyland Middle Ages” where they had the trappings of a class system but no sense of how it actually worked. He’s out to set the record straight.

3. It’s about growing up. One of the main reasons I started reading A Game of Thrones – other than that my son insisted that I try it – was an article about the fantasy genre in The Wall Street Journal by Lev Grossman. In it, Grossman systematically takes apart the standard biases that many (grown ups) bring to this sort of literature. One of the points Grossman makes is that fantasy – pace Harry Potter -  is often dismissed for being  about “the moment when a powerless, mundane person realizes that he or she is anything but.” Grossman accepts this characterization, but then goes on to point out that by the time we’re 35 – if not older – most of us are still figuring out who we are and what we want out of life. So why should a coming of age tale be any less resonant for adults than it is for kids? As someone who blogs about adulthood as a journey, I had to agree.

4.The violence is graphic; the sex is not. When I tell people that my 11 year-old has read the entire series, they often react with horror. So of course I had to go back and read the first book after he’d finished the first five volumes in order to know just how badly I’d screwed up as a parent. The fact is, there is tons of brutal violence described in minute detail. But is that really so much worse than your average video game (which I do, as a parent, limit)? And as for the sex, so far at least, it’s few and far between and quite muted. You pick your poison as a parent. (Can I patent that?) And I think that in this case, the superb story-telling and breadth of characters Martin introduces us to far outweighs the “bad” bits.

5. You will bond with your teen. My son is on the cusp of being a teenager, and all that entails. But right now, every morning my son asks me which chapter in of A Game of Thrones I’m on and we have a lengthy discussion. And for me, that would be worth it even if I hated the book.

Image: Fantasy Faire Unicornuus by Michelle Hyacinth via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

Every Wednesday I offer tips for adulthood.

Over the course of last week’s blackout at RealDelia – or “blogout,”  as I ‘m now calling it (Can I coin that term?) – one of the many things that caught my eye was an article by Zoe Williams in the Guardian suggesting that we should all ditch novels in favor of non-fiction.

Her argument basically boiled down to the claim that  in dire, apocalyptic times like these, where we face the threat of global warming, financial crisis and political turmoil on a daily basis, we can’t afford to bury our heads in the airy-fairy world of fiction. Rather, we need to don our serious hats and seek to better understand the origin of earthquakes and trade deficits and the like.

I’m not sure I see that there’s necessarily a trade-off between the two. More to the point, however, I completely reject her premise that fiction is so obviously apolitical.

I don’t know what sort of fiction Ms. Williams is reading – and I hope, and rather suspect – that she wrote the article as a form of link-bait more than anything else. But I read a lot of fiction, and much of it is not only political, but highly timely and relevant.

So, just as I once recommended five political films worth viewing, I hereby submit five recent political novels worth reading:

1. Freedom. Say what you will about Jonathan Franzen’s latest epic novel about America. Some people loved it; some hated it. I was in the “loved it” camp. But however you felt, there is no denying that this is a deeply political novel about the United States at the turn of the twentieth century as it confronts the inevitable limitations and contradictions  embedded in its love-affair with personal choice. Along the way, we get a full-on immersion in party politics, environmentalism, college athletics and infidelity, all presented through the central prism of one family’s slow and painful collapse.

2. Saturday. This novel traces a day in the life of a middle-class doctor in London who goes to work on that precise Saturday in 2003 when thousands of people turned out to protest the War in Iraq. OK, sure. The War in Iraq now feels like yesterday’s news. But the anger and outrage that brought all those people out onto the street  still exists, even if the target has changed. (Today, two million people in this country participated in a 24-hour walk out to protest against pension reforms put forth by the current government.)  But author Ian McEwan is also addressing a deeper point in this brilliantly crafted novel about the political mood in Britain post 9/11: what it means to be political and whether one can truly remain detached from politics in this day and age.

3. The Tiger’s Wife. This novel has been nominated for every award in sight over the past year and justifiably so. It is a beautifully written, almost fable-like tale about family and history in twentieth century Yugoslavia. Although told with a sort of magical realist veneer, the horror and tragedy of the war that ripped apart this Balkan nation is never far below the surface. Plus, once you learn that the author, Téa Obreht, is only 25, you’ll be green with envy.

4.  The White Tiger. Another beautifully written book which has the added bonus of being laugh-out-loud funny. This book addresses politics in the developing world – specifically India. Through the rags to riches story of one boy-turned-man, the author, Aravind Adiga, exposes two sides of India (and practically every other poor country out there):  the vast, seemingly endless stretches of poverty and kinship ties and the small, almost impenetrable circles of wealth and greed. It’s a damning  – if not humorous – indictment of how it really works in most countries facing a similar socio-economic predicament. You will laugh and cry in equal measure.

5. American Wife. I just finished this (on the recommendation of a friend) and must confess that I could not put it down. As some of you may know, this book is a fictional account of Laura Bush’s life prior to and during her role as first lady. It’s not autobiographical in any way, shape or form, and is not meant to be factual, although it does include some incidents that bear an uncanny resemblance to Laura Bush’s life. I adored the author – Curtis Sittenfeld’s – first book, Prep, about what it’s like to be a Midwestern misfit at a posh, East Coast boarding school. And American Wife has that same sort of observant, interior voice that was featured in Prep. It’s a book that will definitely make you think about marriage. But it will also make you think specifically about political marriages. In an era where the First Lady is widely being touted as President Obama’s best “electoral weapon,” how much are political spouses expected to believe in their candidates?

OK, so those are just a few of the political novels I pulled off the top of my head. I didn’t even include any of the explicitly 9/11 novels like Neverland and/or The Submission because I haven’t read either of them yet.

What am I missing? What good political novels have you read lately and would you like to add to the list?

Image: Protest 11 by marcovdc via Flickr under a Creative Commons license

Every so often you read a book or watch a film that you need to put down or look away from because it cuts too close to the bone.

So it was for me the other night when my husband and I finally finished watching the 1981 British television adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Brideshead Revisited, an 11 episode meditation on privilege, family, religion and sexuality, all set in England between the Wars.

Most people – even those who haven’t read the book or seen the series – use  “Brideshead” as shorthand for the flamboyant excesses of the British aristocracy on its last legs. And make no mistake, there’s no shortage of champagne flutes, dinner jackets and preposterously polite banter. In short, it’s the kind of thing that Americans tend to lap up. (See: Upstairs, Downstairs, Gosford Park and most recently, Downton Abbey.)

The actors are to die for. The series launched Jeremy Irons’ career and also features outstanding performances by Diana Quick, Anthony Andrews, Lawrence Olivier and more. Plus, any film that dwells on extensive bouts of family conflict, alcoholism and unspoken homo-eroticism? I’m there.

So that was all well and good. But as the series wore on, it became increasingly clear that this wasn’t just another voyeuristic journey into the heart of Oxbridge-bred England. Rather, it was essentially a protracted tale of one family’s inexorable, inter-generational and self-destructive struggle with Catholicism.

I’ve written before about my own personal struggles with my family’s faith. How my husband and I have tried, through the years, to reconcile my religious Catholic upbringing with his cultural Jewish identity. And how that has led me to become, begrudgingly, over time, a sort of reluctant secularist.

What Brideshead Revisited added to that equation was the pain and guilt that goes along with that decision. I wanted desperately, as I watched, to identify with Charles Ryder, the protagonist of the story. He is the stoic, eternally rational hero who can’t quite fathom why this otherwise well-educated and cultured family in which he has become enmeshed – The Flytes – is so hopelessly caught up in their Roman Catholic faith.

Instead, I ended up identifying with Julia, his beloved, who tries her very best to leave her religion (and thus, to some extent, her family) by embracing Charles (and divorce and modernity) and the skepticism it implies. In the end, however, it’s too much for her and she can’t quite bring herself to do it. It breaks her heart, but she chooses the Church over her true love. It is her destiny.

I won’t do that. I left the church long ago and save a few masses here and there and the occasional compunction to pray on airplanes, I don’t think I’ll ever go back to Catholicism. Or any other religion, for that matter.  Even Judaism.

But I experience that as a loss. And it’s a painful one.

And that’s why I envy all the atheists I know, who make up about 90% of the people around me, including my husband. They don’t share this anguish. It doesn’t keep them awake at night.

I would love to have that peace of mind.

But I don’t.

And that, my friends, is one price of adulthood. At least mine.

Image: IMG_2994 by Franie Frou Frou via Flickr under a Creative Commons License.

I’ve been thinking a lot about reading lately.

I suppose it’s because it’s that time of the year again. You know, when everyone starts posting their “Summer Reading Lists” – a selection of books that you can and should devour when you have those mythical four weeks of lolly-gagging around the pool/beach/barbecue…you name it.

(Me? I tend to spend my summers lolly-gagging around the Talacre Sports Centre about a half-mile from my home, desperately trying to squeeze in some work in between lugging my kids to their various camps. But I suppose “there’s always tomorrow,” as Annie once said….)

If you’re like me, summer reading lists don’t inspire excitement or inspiration. They merely inspire dread and a looming sense of failure. And that’s because they remind me how very many books I wish to read and how very few of those I’ll ever manage to actually get through.

On my bedside table right now I’ve got two books open which I’m mid-way through – Tea Obreht’s award-winning The Tiger’s Wife and Hans Fallada’s haunting holocaust-era thriller, Alone In Berlin.

Buried underneath them are, in no particular order: Michael Lewis’ The Blind Side (which is relevant to my own-novel-in-progress), Lorrie Moore’s A Gate At The Stairs (because Book Snob Katy Keim recommended it) and Tolstoy’s War and Peace. (Yup, it’s true.)

(I do give myself credit for finally donating Eternal Message of Muhammed to the library. What can I say? Old habits die hard.)

If you glance at this list, you may be wondering: Does she really plan to get through all of these books this summer – let alone in her lifetime?

And therein lies the dilemma of reading. I love to do it and try, most nights, to read before going to bed. (Unless, of course, I’m watching our box set of The Wire.) But it’s a sisyphean task because no sooner do I knock one book off of my night table, another slides in to take its place. And I’m left feeling…behind.

Which is why I was so delighted to happen upon an article on the NPR website by Linda Holmes entitled “The Sad Beautiful Fact That We’re All Going To Miss Almost Everything.” Holmes’ basic point is that in today’s world, there are an infinite amount of good books/movies/artistic treasures to consume. ( I would add that in light of technology, there are also a never-ending barrage of reminders about their existence, as well as how easy it is to access them. (Click here!))

And yet, we can’t possibly consume everything out there that we’re told is worthwhile. Which leaves us, according to Holmes – with two options: to “cull”  – i.e. to self-consciously decide what’s worth our time and what we should ignore – or to “surrender” – i.e., to accept that we can’t possibly make it through all of these great works, but that failing to do so should not threaten our sense that we are ‘well read.’”

The second option is painful, but oddly liberating. As she writes: “It is the recognition that well-read is not a destination; there is nowhere to get to, and if you assume there is somewhere to get to, you’d have to live a thousand years to even think about getting there, and by the time you got there, there would be a thousand years to catch up on.”

Such sage wisdom. Not only for reading, but for life. 

I love this idea. To view reading not as the summit, but as the mountain-climbing itself. And to recognize the sadness – and also the relief – embedded in that journey.

Whew! I feel better already.

Which reminds me – I really need to get my summer reading list out…

Image: get my hands on by mrsexsmith via Flickr under a Creative Commons license

Every Wednesday I offer tips for adulthood.

Every so often on this blog, I point you towards books or movies that I think constitute essential reads/views for grown ups. I did it most recently with Muriel Barbery’s fabulous The Elegance Of The Hedgehog which was – to my mind, at least – all about adulthood.

This week I’m going to do it again with David Grossman’s beautifully raw novel, To The End Of The Land. This is, quite possibly, the saddest book I’ve ever read.

It recounts one woman’s walk across Israel while her 18 year-old son is called up for a 28-day military exercise. She sets off on this walk – which runs the span of the entire novel – because she doesn’t want to be home if and when the authorities try to find her should her son die in combat.

On the jacket cover, the novelist Nicole Krauss (The History of Love) writes: “Very rarely you open a book and when you close it again nothing can ever be the same.”

Krauss nails it, in my opinion, and I can’t recommend this book enough, especially for those of you who – like me -  share a fondness for sad books.

Here are five reasons I think everyone should read this book:

a. It’s About Motherhood. This is first and foremost a book about being a parent – and perhaps even more specifically – being a mother.  In the wake of the recent Oscars ceremony, much has been made of Natalie Portman’s famous throwaway line in which she thanked her fiance for giving her the “most important role” of her life — motherhood. Some writers, like Salon’s Mary Elizabeth Williams, worried aloud that Portman was doing women a disservice by trumpeting babies over career.  Others – notably my Politics Daily colleague Joanne Bamberger – endorsed Portman’s take on the dual roles many women confront. As Joanne writes, “On some level being a mother is the greatest role of my life — not superior to others, just the greatest in terms of challenges and rewards.” If you’re feeling caught between these two feminist reads of the Portman moment, then read Grossman’s book. It reveals the fierce, all-consuming, painful and even ambivalent nature of a mother’s love in perhaps the most honest way I’ve ever seen.

b. It’s about parenting a teen. I wrote recently about the challenges of parenting teen-agers in light of new data we have about them. Boy, does this book drive that home. Grossman renders beautifully the delicate mixture of vulnerability and independence that characterizes teen-agers (in this case, boys) in a way that will resonate and, again, cut you to the quick.

c. It’s about what might have been. I once wrote a post about the “road not taken” in which I examined wistfulness as a leit motif of adulthood. My basic point was that whether it’s who you marry or what career you choose or where you live, part of being a grown up is being plagued by what might have been. Because To The End of the Land centers around a relationship between two ex lovers who’ve gone their separate ways (as a result of war) and then reunite in a literal journey of self-discovery, it plays out the whole “road not taken” concept in real time. Wow.

d. It’s about patriotism. I’m not a terribly patriotic individual. It’s not that I have a great deal of antipathy for the mother ship, I’m just not all that inclined to wave a flag or jump on a Fourth of July parade float. But if you live in Israel, you have no choice but to be patriotic. Patriotism is woven into the very fiber of the country, even for those (like the protagonist in this book) who are ambivalent about where they want their country headed. Grappling with one’s patriotism isn’t something you deal with as a child. But it is something which – explicitly or implicitly – everyone must come to terms with as a grown up.

e. It’s about Israel. This is also a book about Israel and the unbelievably complicated feelings it arouses in its citizens. One of the things I liked most about the book is that no one emerges as a winner in the seemingly eternal and intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict that has dominated (until quite recently) our coverage of the Middle East: not the Israelis, not the Arabs, not foreign powers like the U.S. who figure largely there. However you feel about the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, there is no question that resolving it is central to a lasting peace in the Middle East, even with all of the other things going on in the region right now. That is an enduring reality of our collective adulthood.

Image; Israel – The Negev by Stella’s Mom via Flickr under a Creative Commons License

My ten year-old came home from school the other day with an assignment from his teacher: to write an original story based around the concept of a “ship wreck.”

He promptly sat down at the dinner table and began composing his opus. It was the story of a “tan skinned” pirate of Somali origin who hijacks a boat with an AK-47. In broken English, the pirate threatens all the passengers on the ship with his weapon. Then they die.

When my son showed me his essay afterwards, I was mortified. “You can’t write this!” I exclaimed. “You sound like a racist!” I then forced him to expurgate the most offensive passages from his text, including the color of the pirate’s skin and the derogatory description of his accent.

But when I recounted this story to an English friend of mine, she just shook her head. “Oh you Americans!” she said, laughing. “You’re so hung up on political correctness! An English teacher would neither notice nor care about any of this. Lighten up!”

I was reminded of this vignette earlier this week when I read that a new edition of Mark Twain’s classic novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is coming out in February. In the new version, all instances of the N-word – which appears more than 200 times in the book – are to be expunged. In its place, the book will employ the term “slave.” (“Injun” – a derogatory term for Native Americans – will also be replaced by “Indian.”)

Read the rest of this story at www.PoliticsDaily.com…

Image: Huck Finn by CaZaTo Ma via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

Every Wednesday I offer tips for adulthood.

I spent most of last week in bed, shaking off a flu.

I really fight against being ill. On some fundamental level, I don’t want to accept that my defenses are down and that I can’t accomplish what I normally do in a day. So I spend a lot of time feeling frustrated when I’m sick, which is, of course, not only pointless but counter-productive.

But then I read this great post over on Daily Plate of Crazy about how Big Little Wolf woke up one day feeling really lousy and decided that even though it meant tossing out her “interminable checklist,” she accepted that she was ill and had a really nice day in, reading magazines and watching chick flicks.

And that made me realize that if you re-frame it, being sick can actually be a nice excuse to relax and engage “comfort activities” that you might not allow yourself during your normal routine. And I vowed that the next time I’m ill, I’m going to approach it with a whole new outlook. Here are five things to do when you’re sick:

1. Play Board Games. I’m a huge fan of board games. And, once again this year, I have used Hanukkah as an excuse to replenish our supply. (This year’s additions include Backgammon, Risk and Battleship.) The drawback (and advantage) of board games like these is that they can take several hours to play. And so you really need to clear an entire afternoon or evening, which can be tough to manage during “normal times.” But when you’re sick, you’ve got nothing better to do. So assuming you can actually sit up, playing a board game is an excellent way to spend a sick day.

2. Watch Old Movies. I’m not sure why, exactly, but watching old movies is another great comfort activity when you’re not feeling your best. In theory, any film should do, right? But there’s something particularly soothing about old movies. My daughter’s school is performing Oliver! for the Christmas play this year so we happened to have a copy of the film lying around last weekend. And so all four of us snuggled up in our bed and watched Oliver! as a family. Lovely.

3. Drink Tea. I don’t drink much tea these days. I’m more of an espresso-brewing gal. But when I’m sick, I take a hiatus from coffee and drink only tea. And I *always* enjoy that. There’s nothing that screams relaxation quite as much as a large mug of tea. Preferably with sugar and milk. Yum.

4.Take a nap. This has got to be the classic comfort activity that I routinely deny myself during my “normal life.” Despite all the research showing that taking a 30 minute nap every afternoon is really conducive to productivity, I never, ever nap unless I’m feeling ill. But when I’m sick, I allow myself this luxury and boy, is it worth it every time.

5. Read a guilty pleasure. This will vary from person to person. I don’t read women’s magazines so that’s never going to be a comfort activity for me. But I did find my eye straying to the pile of “to be read” books by my bedside table – you know, the ones that you really want to read but always feel you *should* be reading something else? So after, like, I don’t know…8 years?, I finally picked up Michael Lewis’ Liar’s Poker and plunged in. Just like that. So glad I did.

OK, so you know where I’m going with this, right? If these things are all so fantastic, then why don’t I incorporate them into my regular routine?

I’m working on it, folks. Really I am.

*****

For those who are interested, here’s my latest piece in Politics Daily on the woman in Iran sentenced to death by stoning.

Image: Nightime tea pot by racineur via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

Every Wednesday I offer tips for adulthood.

Sometimes it’s the off-hand comment that really gets you thinking.

So there I was in the playground yesterday, about to pick my daughter up from school, when I started talking to a friend who was also waiting for her son. We were midway into a vague, “How’s it goin’?” sort of chat, when she suddenly commented, seemingly out of nowhere: “You seem so busy. Do you ever eat lunch?”

I laughed, reassuring her that I did, even while suppressing the memory of stuffing a peanut butter and jelly sandwich into my mouth but two hours earlier as I galloped up a hill towards a bi-monthly appointment with my life coach (whom I see to help me…relax.)

But it gets better. As we talked some more about my work schedule, my double-school-run-afternoons and my husband’s recent business travel, she asked – in all seriousness – “Do you ever watch TV?”

She meant it in the nicest way, of course. She’s a really nice person. But, still, it cut me like a knife.

I mean: Do I ever watch TV? Am I so busy that the image I now project is that of a pop-culture-bereft, ready-meal-popping freak show who zips around North London on her collapsible bicycle desperately trying to keep up with her life? (Don’t answer that question. And by the way, does falling asleep to the Director’s Cut of Pride and Prejudice count as “watching TV”?)

So I gave it some thought. And I realized that I have been working too hard lately and trying to do too much. And I really need to relax. Here are five other tell-tale signs that you need to take a break:

1. Strangers tell you that you look rushed. It’s one thing when a friend tells you that you seem over-worked. But when even a stranger expresses concern that you’re too busy, it’s really time to take note. I was in the pharmacy the other day – where, because of the multitude of medical problems afflicting my family – the pharmacists are basically my extended family. Again, seemingly out of nowhere, the owner of the shop stepped forward and observed: “You always seem to be in a rush.” (“Why do you say that?” I wanted to reply. “Because I just knocked 42 of your contact lens solutions on the floor when I whooshed in here to grab my prescription while – literally – jogging?”) Once again, she meant it in the nicest way. This lady brings the descriptor “kindly” to a whole new level. And that made her remark all the more telling.

2. Muscle pain migrates to new corners of your body. Remember my piriformis syndrome? Thought I had that licked, didn’t you? Nope. It’s back. Only it has inexplicably migrated to the left side of my body. As soon as the pain started about six weeks ago, I recognized the symptoms instantly. And for a while, I ignored it. (Even though you should never ignore pain. You heard it here first.) But you know it’s time to cut back on what you’re doing when your body is basically screaming: “Hey! Pay Attention to Me!”

3. You feel relieved when you *have* to read your favorite magazine. I love The New Yorker. But despite my Sabbath Saturday resolve to devote more time to reading this magazine, I’ve fallen off the wagon. There are three – quite possibly, four – issues sitting in my magazine rack as we speak. One day last week, I found myself waiting for one of my kids for an hour with nothing to do but read my New Yorker. And I felt…relieved. As in: “Thank goodness this hour presented itself miraculously in my life!” Not as in: “Gee, I love the New Yorker and I think I’ll spend an hour reading it this afternoon because I want to.” What’s wrong with this picture?

4. You mistake tragedy for comedy. I love Indie films. The bleaker, the better. So when I recommended Winter’s Bone to some friends recently, I was puzzled when one of them, while passing me on the school run, shouted out: “Hey, thanks for the movie recommendation. We had a lovely evening. But it was a bit…grim, no?” To which I responded: “Grim? Really? I found it kind of uplifting.” When I recounted this exchange to my husband later that evening, he looked at me as if I were smoking crack. Like me, he also loved the movie. But “uplifting”? To paraphrase his reaction, when you mix poverty, drugs, murder and rural American sub-cultures, that’s not generally characterized as “uplifting.” Just sayin’.

5. You read Nora Ephron. I like my books much like I prefer my movies: heavy and (often) dark. (For me, the Dragon Tattoo series constitutes “light.”) So when my book club chose Nora Ephron’s Heartburn as its selection this month, I was initially disappointed. Not my cuppa, as they say. Boy, was I wrong. It’s not a great novel by any stretch. In fact, it’s not so much a novel as an extended rant by Ephron against her ex-husband for cheating on her when she was seven months pregnant. (And who can blame her?) But, man is Ephron funny. She has a terrific voice. And sometimes, we all just need to laugh.

Fortunately, I will have a chance to take a break later this month when I travel with my family – and my mother – to Berlin, one of those European cities I’ve always wanted to visit. Let’s just hope that whole terrorist threat thing has lifted by then. Speaking of grim…

*****

I was very grateful for this shout-out on the New York Times Freakonomics blog for my recent piece on health care reform in the U.K.

Image: Eat On The Run by Brave Heart via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.