Flush with the international success of Simple Abundance (Warner, 528 pages, $24), the inspirational book that debuted 10 years ago, writer Sarah Ban Breathnach once rented a posh New York apartment, right on Central Park West.
"Oh," she almost moans when I ask her about it, as we settle in for afternoon tea at the Drake Hotel, "It was very beautiful."
Dressed in a boldly designed jacket and clearly enthralled with a mahogany-and-velvet environment that is far more abundant than simple, Ban Breathnach continues with a sigh, "it was like a boyfriend you see every time you come to the city --"
"The kind of boyfriend," I ask, "who you know is all wrong for you?"
"Oh, yes," she responds enthusiastically, drawing out the syllables to indicate that there is really no other kind of boyfriend worth having.
Ban Breathnach (it's "Bon Brannock") knows that obvious luxuries like the apartment and the jacket don't exactly go along with the sweet, slightly countrified image of an author who once invited readers to "pick up the needle . . . and make the first stitch on the canvas of your life."
"Women definitely expected Laura Ashley," she says ruefully.
'It couldn't have been me'
Ten years later, Ban Breathnach is finally telling the story of what it was like to become an overnight sensation after 25 years of writing.
Her new book, Moving On (Meredith Books, 284 pages, $24.95), chronicles the strange disconnect she felt at being an ambassador for simplicity but living a life so crazed with publicity and obligations that she hired nine assistants to help manage everything.
It was, she says, almost an out-of-body experience. "When the book first took off," she recalls, "and there was this explosion of attention, I often felt like I wanted to turn around and see who everyone was talking about. Because it couldn't have been me."
Ban Breathnach wants to make clear that she truly believed -- and still believes -- in the philosophies espoused in Simple Abundance, in making time to take care of oneself, in making conscious choices, and expressing gratitude and not getting caught up in material things. It was just that she found it very difficult to actually live in keeping with those principles when she was also living as an Oprah-endorsed multimedia celebrity.
"Sometimes," she says, "it was as if everything was in a foreign language, like I was reading one thing and pronouncing it another way."
Readers, attracted by the conversational tone of Simple Abundance, felt like they knew Ban Breathnach, whom they always addressed, confidentially, as Sarah. They had stories to tell her and rushed to her side at every appearance -- and when they happened to spot her at the grocery store -- to share their tales of lives transformed and authentic selves rediscovered by embracing simplicity. It all got, well, rather complicated.
And things got even messier when Ban Breathnach's marriage ended and the many Web-based chat rooms dedicated to her work suddenly filled with gossip and speculation about her separation and divorce.
"Simple Abundance is who I really am," she says, "but it was difficult to be true to that."
Then she found a small cottage in rural England, which had once been used by Isaac Newton as his personal chapel. The place was for sale, and Ban Breathnach felt compelled to buy it.
Living in Newton's Chapel, as she now does, year round, gave her the chance to once again live a Simple Abundance sort of life.
The story of Moving On, then, is the story of how Ban Breathnach came to appreciate the importance of "home" in her life.
"I think we, as women, create homes for our husbands. We create homes for our children," she says, "And, as a by-product, we get a bed. I bet if you stopped 10 women on the street and asked if they're really comfortable in their homes, most of them would have to admit that there's not much place for them at home, no sanctuary."
If Simple Abundance spelled out a philosophy of living, Moving On offers a practical course in how to make a comfortable life for yourself.
'We do have storage'
"It's about de-cluttering the heart before the closet," Ban Breathnach says, for the first time sounding exactly like the Earth mother-y, New Age-y voice of her books. "The idea for Moving On came when I was cleaning out the attic of my Bethesda, Md., town house [which had once been her primary residence] and getting ready to move into Newton's Chapel. I was going through these boxes, deciding what to ship over. It was the stages of hell."
Ban Breathnach recently remarried and now shares Newton's Chapel with her British husband. When they moved in, she says, there was the challenge of "blending his eclectic tastes" with hers.
"We are still editing," she says diplomatically and then adds, almost desperately, "We do have storage."
It's an ongoing process, she says, this making of a home.
"I think in Moving On," she says, "I wanted to say that in the 10 years since Simple Abundance, life doesn't turn out as you planned. That's pretty universal. And it's not bad. It's good. I'm at peace."
Presumably, the movie deal is out. Unless, of course, a clever screenwriter can make an Adaptation-style sort of meta-story out of it.
Shouldn't Viswanathan have to give some of that money to Megan McCafferty, the lesser-known, and less "successful" author from whom she stole key passages?
I really, really didn't want to get into the whole Caitlin Flanagan thing. Flanagan, in case you (lucky!) haven't heard, is the magazine writer whose new book, To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife (Little, Brown: 244 pages, $22.95) fires the latest round in the mommy wars with the claim that "at-home" motherhood is better for children than motherhood combined with paid, outside work.
The book itself has a bipolar quality, moving back and forth between thoughtful, nuanced discussion of the incredible complexities of figuring out how to raise a family and make a home in the modern world and preachy, moralistic pronouncements on the superiority of women who "sacrifice" their careers -- as Flanagan clearly has not -- in order to tend to the needs of their families.
But Flanagan herself is far more compelling than anything she could possibly write. She's got that traffic-accident quality that you just can't turn away from, even though you know you should.
Still, after reading the book and talking to Flanagan over the phone, I was determined not to take the bait. These hair-pulling girl-on-girl fights about which privileged lifestyle -- the debate seems to be between well-off professional women and well-off stay-at-home moms -- offers the greatest advantage for our next generation of overachievers have a tendency to get old quickly. And, as far as I know, no one on either side has managed to change the mind of anyone on the opposite side, anyway.
I sat on my feminist hands as Flanagan sounded off about how the women's movement had failed us all.
I said nothing -- OK, I did scream, "You're the devil!" while watching Flanagan on "The Colbert Report," but I was alone at the time so it doesn't really count -- about her weird glorification of 1950s-style "traditional" marriages in which men are the unquestioned heads of their households.
I even decided to refrain from remarking on the utter hypocrisy the way Flanagan celebrates domestic life when she has both a job and a staff of household help.
But when Flanagan declared, on "The Brian Lehrer Show" on public radio, that she understood why the United States had gone to war in Iraq and that, in fact, the whole thing could have been avoided if people had only listened to her, I just couldn't help myself. I had to write about it.
Flanagan's argument is that, in failing to embrace her message of stay-at-home superiority, presidential candidate Al Gore alienated legions of voters who might have elected him in 2000. And, if he'd won, the nation's foreign policy would be very different today.
This, you have to admit, is an incredibly neat trick on Flanagan's part. She is, she says, a lifelong Democrat, anti-war and pro-choice. But she is deeply angry at what she feels is the party's intolerance of views that don't toe the feminist line. Republicans, on the other hand, have been warm and incredibly welcoming to Flanagan, she says, even though she has many points of disagreement with them. This, she says, is why Republicans have been winning elections and Democrats have been losing them.
It's kind of funny how it's all about her, isn't it?
If she's wrong, I must be right
Personally, I don't buy into this line of reasoning. As I remember it, the main issues in the 2000 election were Elian Gonzales, Monica Lewinsky and whether Al Gore actually had invented the Internet.
But, beyond that, I did wonder if Flanagan -- despite sometimes seeming unbalanced, as when she shouted at a radio show caller to "stand down!" so she could continue her "and that's why we're in Iraq" monologue -- had a point about the nature of liberal America's stance on the nature of modern motherhood.
Have we become intolerant?
I'm appalled by Flanagan's smug assertion that her twin sons got "an immersion in the most powerful force on Earth: mother love" when she (and her full-time nanny) stayed home with them before they started nursery school, and its unspoken corollary that kids whose mothers held outside jobs somehow got a shallower dip in parental love.
But, at the same time, I find myself feeling unaccountably hostile towards the "opt-out" moms who, in moments of candor, admit that the decision to stay home had more to do with career frustration and burnout than with any particular philosophy of child rearing. I can't look at a highly educated professional woman who drops out of the work force without thinking she's making it just that much harder for the rest of us to convince our colleagues that we're serious about staying.
Like Caitlin Flanagan, I tend to make it all about me.
And maybe that's what accounts for the peculiar nastiness of the mommy wars: it's not just the personal-as-political. It's the political as very, very personal.
Perhaps it's time for a truce.
Maybe we need to stop passing judgment on each other and focus on the important truths on which we can agree.
Like how the war in Iraq is really all Monica Lewinsky's fault.
"Fair Harvard has her crimson, old Yale her colors, too, but for dear Pennsylvania, we wear the red and blue."
This is an actual line from the official school song of my alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania. And, while I've never done any sort of scientific research on this, I am fairly certain that it is the only school song so wrapped up in an institution-wide inferiority complex that it actually mentions other, better schools before mentioning its own name.
It's one of the many reasons I've always adored Penn, which, should I ever strike it really rich, I plan to endow with the Debra Pickett Fund for the Employment of English Majors. There will be a special office in the Career Planning and Placement Center dedicated to finding jobs for kids like me, whose educational training prepared them to be exemplary cocktail party guests, but fell slightly short in the practical skills department.
I was invited to speak, this morning, at a breakfast meeting of the local Penn alumni organization and, though it was mildly difficult to make it downtown for the 7:30 am start (note to organizers of future events: I'm really more of a brunch person, thanks.), the event proved to be very cool indeed.
I introduced myself briefly (being sure to mention how I managed to get fired from my job as a columnist for the school newspaper after a single semester) and then answered a bunch of questions on topics that ranged from media bias to restaurant recommendations. I was having an almost inexplicably great time talking with everyone, when it occurred to me why this was so fun. We were talking.
Where does anyone go, once you're out of grad school, to have actual conversation about stuff that matters? When do you get a chance to talk to people outside your usual circle, with perspectives that differ from your own?
I'm inspired, at the moment, to found some sort of salon, just to try and replicate this morning's experience. But I'd be happy to give up if someone else would like to do it for me. (Or has already done so.)
I've been kind of obsessed with the whole "I'm the decider" line, ever since the President uttered it last Tuesday. I find it a handy thing to shout out when there's a question of, say, what to have for dinner or what to do on Friday night.
Most of the decisions of real consequence in my house are, actually, made in consultation. But, when it comes to the completely insignificant stuff of daily life -- like what we buy at the grocery store -- I'm all over it. This is primarily because I have very little patience for analysis.
R., on the other hand, has an unbelievable talent for accumulating and processing data. This has proved enormously useful in many areas of our life together. For example, I can say with some confidence that we pay less for airline tickets than anyone else we know. Because he has no problem spending an entire day (or more) finding the best possible deal.
But, while this is a valuable skill in big-ticket purchases, it tends to be largely un-helpful with small ones. The question of what to have for dinner isn't really about the most perfect solution for our nutritional needs. On most nights, after work, it's about getting decent food into our mouths as quickly and easily as possible.
"I'm the decider!" I announce when I make the call that tonight (possibly our last night without a fully functional kitchen?!) is the night for frozen pizza and Caesar salad. And I've got to admit, it feels good.
I know why Dubya could barely suppress his grin when he said it. Being The Decider totally rocks.
And, apparently, at least a few other people think so too, as evidenced by this New York Times piece about being The Decider in a relationship. (Extra points to the reporter for quoting a dominatrix. The S&M perspective is missing from way too many news stories these days.)
"A man who's warm can't understand a man who's freezing"
I go back and forth on whether I'm a fan of the whole "One Book, One Chicago" idea. On the one hand, there's the whole creepy intellectual conformity aspect of it -- the Oprahfication of yet one more aspect of life. But, then again, they do pick really good books.
I'm ashamed to admit that I'd never actually read the current selection, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich." I just finished it last night, curled up under a fleece blanket, while R. is out at the Cubs game, enjoying the 40-degree weather like a real Chicagoan.
I'll spare you the "Smart Girls' Book Club" review of it ("full of sassy attitude, but a little slow for a beach read") and just say that it really is an incredibly powerful piece of work.
Still, if I fall in love with the "One Book, One Chicago" thing, is that just one step further down the slippery slope of Daley loyalty that will soon have me looking at the 20-zillion planted-too-soon tulips and not wondering what they cost? Or, worse, will I soon begin to think those "high crime area" police cameras are a good idea?
So it turns out that Kaavya Viswanathan, author of the best-selling chick lit novel How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, lifted key passages and plot elements for the book from another author's work.
I should have posted this on Sunday, when the news of the accusations of plagiarism first came out, via the Harvard Crimson, but, to be perfectly honest, I had absolutely no idea what to say about it. In fact, I feel sort of weirdly guilty about the whole thing, since I've reviewed both authors' work and, actually, gave a slightly better review to Viswanathan than to McCafferty. (I guess the second draft of something generally is an improvement.)
So now I'm in this weird, blogging at 4 am place about the whole thing.
In a quirk of timing, I read Viswanathan's book first (I wasn't on the chick lit beat when McCafferty's first two books came out). And, though I did sort of skim over Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings in preparation for the review of Charmed Thirds, I really wasn't paying close enough attention to really pick up any of the similarities of language.
Still, it bugs me that I bought into the Viswanathan hype. I'm particularly humiliated by having written this passage:
While some of Viswanathan's prose is unimaginative -- too many preppy kids are described as looking like they've stepped off the pages of a J. Crew catalog, for example -- the book's fresh and witty premise rescues it from getting mired in typical nerd-to-cool-girl cliches. Life among New Jersey's suburban elite, with their McMansions and high-end SUVs, is chronicled with an impressive eye for detail and a wit that is smart but not scathing.
Um, yeah, what I meant to say there was "impressive eye for details that someone else already wrote down."
I do give myself some credit, however, for mentioning James Frey in the review. (Random thought: They should totally hook up!)
The fact is that I still haven't fully resolved all my James Frey issues. I actually received a promotional copy of A Million Little Pieces (free books = awesome job perk) before it was an Oprah book, but didn't write about it, or even finish reading it, because I thought it was BS.
Where, oh where, were my news-breaking instincts? Why was I unable to instantly recall this assessment when the book started getting big, national attention?
OK, well, that was sort of cathartic for me. (It would have been more satisfying if I'd been having some ice cream while writing it, but, sadly, our cupboards are bare. Still, I feel like I worked out some issues here. Thanks.)
One last thing to get off my chest, while I'm in confessional mode. On Sunday, I wrote about a guy who created a show that airs on WTTW. Ethically, I should have disclosed that I also appear on a completely different show, Chicago Tonight, which also airs on WTTW. This did not occur to me until it was pointed out to me by my unhappy bosses on Monday.
So, pretty much, I seem to support plagiarism and conflicts of interest whenever possible. Excellent.
In theory, we'll have a working kitchen (including sink!) by the end of the day on Wednesday.
I considered this Sunday afternoon, as I was washing dishes in the bathroom sink, and realized that this whole remodeling exercise has been our version one of those we-were-so-poor-in-our-younger-days stories that older folks often tell about their newlywed days.
Those of us who get married a little later in life (hey, I was 31, which is perfectly respectable) tend not to have those stories to bond over and eventually amuse our spoiled grandchildren. We don't have to live on Tuna Helper without the tuna or live in a poorly insulated 5th floor walkup. (Though we do each have some fairly impressive grad school / first job poverty stories on our own, there hasn't been call for a lot of shared sacrifice.)
But we'll be able to amuse the family with our tale of the 3 weeks when we didn't have a kitchen sink.
This thought made the whole thing a lot less annoying. Or maybe I'm just giddy at the thought of almost being done.
Or maybe the dust and paint fumes have turned my brain to mush.
"I look at 'Check, Please!' as being authentic and diverse," says David Manilow, creator of the popular restaurant review show. "And the thing I'm really proud of is that people are exploring the city because of the show."
We're sitting at a sidewalk table on the corner of 16th Street and 61st Avenue in Cicero, and Manilow, trim and handsome in a sport coat and dress slacks, cheerfully allows that "without the show, I'd never know about a place like this."
The place is Freddy's Pizza, a bustling neighborhood Italian grocery, pizza place and gelateria that, since winning rave reviews on the show, which airs on WTTW-Channel 11, two years ago, has drawn customers from all over the city and suburbs. Manilow gets a hero's welcome here, due only in part to the fact that his show has brought loads of new business to Freddy's. Almost everyone who stops by more than a few times gets a similarly warm greeting, full of how's-the-family banter.
Manilow doesn't have to place an order here. We just claim our table -- a fancy plastic setup that's been molded to look like wood, which he swears has been ordered especially for our lunch -- and, within a few minutes, food is arriving. There's calamari, arrancini (rice balls stuffed with meat), fried artichokes, roasted peppers, an antipasti plate and fresh-baked bread. Just for starters.
Eventually, we'll pull over a second table for the pasta, risotto and pizza.
'Why isn't there a show about this?'
But, meanwhile, we soak in the sunshine and the almost-ambience punctuated by the sounds of passing garbage trucks and road crews.
Manilow, who grew up on the North Side, near Broadway and Wellington, says he has always used restaurants as a way to explore the city, from family outings to Ziggy's on Clark Street to ventures into ethnic neighborhoods. A career in television -- he was Tim Weigel's producer at Channel 7 -- eventually led him to launching a production company with friends in 2000.
But their early work centered more on producing corporate videos than on trying to come up with ideas for hit TV shows. Then Manilow, who'd been married and living in the suburbs, raising three kids, found himself once again single and living in the city. He rediscovered his youthful passion for checking out restaurants of every possible variety and, very soon, started to wonder, "Why isn't there a show about this?"
"This show, honestly," he says, "was one of those things that you think about one morning in the shower, and 48 hours later, you have the whole thing: the name and everything."
'It was fantastic'
The idea, which has been replicated in San Francisco and will soon launch in Los Angeles, was to bring together diverse, authentic "real people" reviewers -- "people who I don't think you would ever see sitting down at a table together" -- to introduce each other to their favorite restaurants, "three restaurants that pretty much no one would ever have been to all three of them."
Since its premiere, more than 30,000 people have applied, via WTTW's Web site, to appear on the show, and Manilow and his staff have an elaborate screening and scheduling process that ensures lively conversation and diverse perspectives. (Though the wine, served to reviewers as their conversation is filmed, also tends to help things along, Manilow adds.)
In the beginning, though, there was the challenge of filming several episodes without any mechanism for recruiting reviewers.
"We were getting friends-of-friends-of-friends," Manilow says, adding that he also recruited a few telegenic strangers, like a magician whose performance he went to see.
"On the first show," he recalls, "we had a picture framer, who was pierced and tattooed all over, and a suburban homemaker/artist and a very, very snobbish doctor. The restaurants were Earwax Cafe, Sushi Kushi Toyo, in a suburban strip mall, and Blackbird. You can pretty easily figure out who picked what. Well, on the air, the doctor said he was so glad to have found this sushi place, which he would have never been to in a million years. Then they argued over Earwax [the hip Wicker Park cafe selected by the framer], and the [picture framer] said he wasn't comfortable at Blackbird. It was fantastic."
'I have a great time'
A hit right away, the show is now the most-watched of all WTTW's local programming and, in addition to its San Francisco and Los Angeles incarnations, might also launch in the Washington, D.C., and Seattle areas. Manilow is so thrilled that he seems almost unable to believe his good fortune.
"Are you from that show, 'Check, Please!'?" asks a woman seated at a nearby table, noticing the photographer snapping away as Manilow holds court.
He laughs joyously at the question. ("Check, Please!" reviewers are not accompanied by cameras when they dine out. In fact, the show only films the restaurants after the reviewers' conversation has already been recorded.)
"I'm totally thrilled when that happens," he says, wiping the corner of his eye in a self-mocking sentimental gesture. "I mean, really, how great is this? I have a great time; I meet great people."
He samples from every plate in front of us, crediting the "genetics diet" for his slim frame, clearly relishing the food and, even more, the incredible friendliness of this busy corner.
Manilow, who does not consider himself a foodie -- "What's a foodie, really?" he asks. "Someone who only eats the best of everything? There's greatness in a cheeseburger, as far as I'm concerned." -- has early memories of just finishing one of his mother's home-cooked meals and then opening up the refrigerator, just for the comfort of seeing what might be served the next day.
"But the thing about Chicagoans," says Manilow, who lives in Lake View, a few blocks away from the apartment where he grew up and his mother still lives, "is that, when they talk about a meal, they don't talk about the food first. It's about the feeling, about the people."
Full disclosure: To my great disappointment, I've never been called for jury duty. And, while any prosecutor in his right mind would immediately try to bounce a bleeding heart liberal like me, I'd really like to believe that I'd make an excellent juror.
Also: While thinking about today's column, I came up with an excellent little social engineering idea that could revolutionize jury service in Chicago. I think the wealthy "opt out" moms are the ideal jury pool. For one thing, they clearly don't need the money. So, instead of the small daily stipend, they could be compensated with fancy coffee drinks and trunk show shopping opportunities. And they could bring the fabulous strollers with them. It would be just like going to Starbucks, but with additional topics of conversation.
Today's column: Want to clean up juries? Bring in the yuppies
The snobbish, cynical view of the Ryan trial and its aftermath is that it's perfectly appropriate that a jury of the former governor's peers would turn out to be full of liars and petty criminals.
But, tempting as it is to trot out the old saw about a jury being a collection of 12 people who aren't smart enough to get out of jury duty, it isn't fair to cast aspersions on the folks who -- whether they started out in good faith or not -- spent six months of their lives hearing testimony in a complicated, slow-moving legal matter. They were willing to show up and serve, which is more than you can say for a lot of us.
Still, it is striking -- at least from the profoundly sheltered point of view of someone who thinks getting arrested and taken to court is a very big deal -- that so many of the jurors in the Ryan case either have criminal records themselves or are closely involved with someone who does.
This made me wonder if the city's growing population of overachieving yuppies -- people who either avoided crime because it would look bad on their college transcripts or had parents capable of getting youthful indiscretions cleared from their permanent records -- were somehow underrepresented in the jury pool.
I decided to conduct a highly scientific survey of Chicago's yuppie elite to see how frequently they'd been called to serve on juries and how many times they'd actually served. My working hypothesis was that lots of them would have been summoned, but most, considering their time too valuable for an activity antithetical to both multitasking and profitability, would have found a way to get out of actually showing up. I figured that pro-jury-service cultural trends -- Oprah, wearing her cute outfits at 26th and California; big celebrity trials in which jurors get a few minutes of quoted-on-ET fame; the ubiquity of ''Law & Order'' reruns -- would not have significant influence over people who like to consider themselves trend setters, rather than followers.
Basically, I was assuming that people who buy their coffee at Dunkin' Donuts would be inclined to serve on juries, while those who prefer Starbucks would not.
Scientific method
On Thursday morning, I sought to enlist the Sun-Times' crack sociological survey team to design a study that would test both parts of my hypothes
