Mrs. Magoo readies for her closeup; next stop, stardom as a cyber-TV celebrity book critic?

(Photo courtesy Mrs. Magoo)

In the fall of 2007, the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) ran a lengthy essay by Steve Wasserman, a former editor of The Los Angeles Times Book Review, titled “Goodbye to All That.”
It offers a fascinating glimpse into the dire state of newspaper book review sections and Steve began by tallying the vanishing coverage at major newspapers. To darken the picture even further, he then went on to correlate that with the exploding number of books published every year.
In the mid-1980s, he reported, about 50,000 books a year were published. Today, the total is three times that number. But the pages devoted each week to reviewing books has steadily shrunk, with entire sections folding in the wake of anemic ad revenues from book-related advertising.

Meg Waite Clayton and her creation.

For anyone who has ever dreamed of becoming an author, Meg Waite Clayton’s website is a delightful and inspiring place to visit.
Meg is the author of the bestselling novel, The Wednesday Sisters, a book about a group of women friends. They meet at a park in Palo Alto, California, in the late 1960s and form a writers’ circle. Along the way, as the war in Vietnam rages, American astronauts land on the moon and the Women’s Movement challenges much of what they think about themselves. They support each other through changes in their personal lives brought on by infidelity, longing, illness, failure, and success.
I loved Meg’s book in part because I was born in Palo Alto in the 1960s and the book helped me imagine what my own mother’s life might have been like at the time. I also loved The Wednesday Sisters because it celebrates the strong bonds and support that can be provided by a good writers group. And I am lucky to be a member of two such groups that helped me navigate the often treacherous waters leading to publication.
Long before I began the Wall Street Journal article that led to The House of Mondavi, I joined a long-standing group of women nonfiction writers who usually met every two weeks in San Francisco’s Noe Valley. We came to call ourselves “North 24th,” because we’d usually meet north of 24th Street.

Book lover Liz Epstein guides groups through the classics; below, at Book Group Expo, panelists Sara Davidson, Po Bronson and Elizabeth Gilbert interact with moderator Sam Barry — and the book group community.

Top photo from bookpassage.com; bottom photo from fora.tv

If there is a modern American equivalent to the French salons of the 17th and 18th centuries, it may be found in the thousands of book groups that gather regularly across the nation in living rooms, public libraries, and local coffee houses to discuss literature and ideas – often passionately, and with a great deal of wine and laughter involved.
For those who complain that America has become a nation of non-readers, don’t try telling that to my book group, which began eight years ago and has remained sturdily and stubbornly afloat all this time. Some of our original members have dropped, to be replaced by others along the way. But we’ve almost always had a large group of about eight to 10 members, all of whom are mothers who love books.
I helped found our group with my friend Liz Epstein. Like me, she had recently returned to the U.S. after living overseas for many years. Although we both lived in London during the 1990s, we never met each other there. It wasn’t until our first-borns enrolled in the same kindergarten class that we realized we had a lot in common – including both feeling culture shock after returning home to the states.
The book club we formed as a result helped reduce some of that shock, partly through the friendships we formed but also by reading wonderful British fiction together, such as Monica Ali’s Brick Lane. Since those early days, Liz has gone on to earn a Masters’ in English Literature and to launch a business moderating book clubs called Literary Masters.

Who knew such a dainty garden setting would occasion talk of “the two Ls”?

I’ve met a lot of wonderful people while touring to promote the paperback release of The House of Mondavi, but surely one of the most memorable was Helen Dufficy.
Helen, a lively 91-year-old who lives in a retirement community called The Tamalpais, came to the annual fund-raising talk and lunch for the Moya Library/Ross Historical Society in the small town of Ross, Calif., last week. The library is housed in an octagon-shaped building at the center of the Marin Art and Garden Center and is the oldest surviving structure of what use to be the estate of a founding family of the town. Tucked behind a pond near the library is a folly that delighted our sons when they were small – a fairy tale house that looks as if it came from the pages of one of the Grimm Brothers’ stories.
I’d been invited to be the guest speaker for the fund-raiser and had fun talking about my book to a group of 50 or so people which included my mother, several of her closest friends, and neighbors – some of whom I bump into at our small town’s local post office nearly every day. The average age of the group was perhaps 70.
After my talk, we had an al fresco lunch by the pond, and I had the great pleasure of being seated next to Mrs. Dufficy, who explained that her late husband, Dr. Rafael Dufficy, had often been asked whether the nearby town of San Rafael had been named after him (in jest, presumably, since the city of San Rafael dates back to California’s Mission Era). Mrs. Dufficy had been coming to the Art and Garden Center for years. “I’ve loved this place since I was young,” she told me.

Christina Meldrum

I read the galleys of my friend Christina Meldrum’s stunning debut novel, Madapple, over a single, rainy afternoon a few months ago. I refused to get up off the couch, despite the requests of my husband and sons, until I’d finished the last page. What a book! I truly couldn’t put it down. Christina has written a gripping page-turner that explores the dichotomy between religion and science. Reading it, I felt as if I’d entered into a dream state where nothing was quite what it seemed.

Christina began her book nearly a decade ago, while she was still working as a litigator at a San Francisco law firm. She would rise at five a.m. daily and write in the darkness of dawn for about an hour, her computer providing the only light, before heading to her San Francisco office. She had majored in religion as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, and then went on to Harvard Law School. Although she had the drive and intelligence to be recruited as an associate by one of the top law firms in the world, Christina didn’t find what she was looking for in the practice of that profession.

The future of community? Photo from smh.com.au (Sydney Morning Herald)

Writing, by its nature, is a solitary undertaking. Reading, too, is done mostly on one’s own. So why not bring writers together with readers in a virtual community?

Redroom.com is the one of several social networks devoted to the love of literature. Yet, it is pulling ahead in the race by attracting big names. Maya Angelou, Amy Tan, Jon Stewart, Salman Rushdie, and even Barack Obama are Redroom.com members. So are lesser known writers such as Belle Yang, author of The Odyssey of a Manchurian and Baba: A Return to China Upon My Father’s Shoulders; Bill Hayes, author of The Anatomist: A True Story of Gray’s Anatomy; and Peter Coyote, best known as an actor but also the author of Sleeping Where I Lie.

Lunch in The Grotto Photo from sfgrotto.org

This month, I’ve been spending time at The Grotto, the famed San Francisco writers’ community which is home to such West Coast literary luminaries as Po Bronson, David Ewing Duncan, ZZ Packer, Jason Roberts, Julia Scheeres, Ethan Watters, and many others. One of my favorite parts of making the trek to the Grotto’s offices on 2nd and Bryant Streets is lunchtime, when Grotto dwellers emerge from their offices, where they’ve been tapping away in the dim glow provided by their laptops, to gather in the brightly painted conference room for brown-bag lunches and conversation with other members of the tribe.
It’s not unusual for guests to join Grottoites over lunch. On Monday, Van Jones, founder of Green for All and co-writers of a forthcoming book called The Green-Collar Economy, joined us. Van, who lives in Oakland, was recently a guest on The Colbert Report and admitted to having been flummoxed by his host’s comments (including one about “green” love machines and another about “unicorn herding”). That prompted Laura Fraser to share her experience of having to strip down to her knickers while her suit was being ironed prior to her appearance on one of the network morning shows.