Another gorgeous day at UCLA campus. The organic coffee stand, where I typically grab a java before the first panel, was fresh out when I got there this morning. No matter, I patiently waited the twenty minutes (even though they said it would take five) until the jugs of freshly brewed hot stuff arrived on a golf cart. Suffice it to say I had to slurp it down in a hurry, scalded tongue be damned, while huffing it back to where I'd started yesterday.
Fiction: Laugh Track
Franz 1178 - 10:30 a.m.
Sarah Dunn - Author of Official Slacker Handbook and the novels The Big Love and Secrets to Happiness. Dunn was the executive story editor for Spin City and is now a full-time novelist. She lives in New York.
Merrill Markoe - Emmy-winning author of humorous essays and novels. She has worked as a radio host and TV correspondent, and has written for television, movies and an assortment of publications. Her newest novel is Nose Down, Eyes Up.
Bill Scheft - Former head writer for Letterman and nominated for thirteen Emmys. He has also written for the New York Times and other publications. Everything Hurts is his first novel.
Maria Semple - Used to write for several TV shows including Arrested Development, Mad About You, and Ellen. Her first novel is titled This One Is Mine.
Moderator: Amy Wallen - Author of the Los Angeles Times best-selling novel Moon Pies and Movie Stars. She teaches creative writing at UC San Diego Extension and hosts the monthly open-mic prose reading sponsored by San Diego Writers Ink, for which she also serves on the advisory board.
Notes
This panel's draw for me was Sarah Dunn. When she published her debut novel, The Big Love, back in the summer of 2004, I read a very positive review of it in Entertainment Weekly. It was her first novel so of course I'd never heard of her, but the EW critic compared her writing to that of Sex and the City. I was a big fan of that show. It had some of the snappiest writing around. As a writer myself, I appreciate how tough that is. So when this critic made that comparison, my ears sort of perked up. And then, a few weeks later, Sarah did a signing at Vroman's in Pasadena. At the time I worked just a mile down the road from Vroman's. So after work on the night of the signing, I headed down and met her. It wasn't a big turnout. And yes, I was the only guy. But I still got to hear her read an excerpt before meeting her and having her sign my copy. She was sweet about trying to make me feel less self-conscious. "I really love it when guys come to my signings, I do!" I thought it was cute. And she's pretty cute herself. An adorable blonde.
The Big Love was quite successful. It's been translated into twenty-three languages. And it was the last I'd heard of her until I read the Book Fest program in last Sunday's paper. Sure enough, she just published her second novel, Secrets to Happiness, and was going to make her first-ever Book Fest appearance to promote it. A lot's happened in five years. She moved from L.A. to New York, and she and her husband just had their first child.
I'd never heard of anyone else on the panel, but so what? If you read yesterday's post, you'll know part of the joy of these events is discovering new authors. First and foremost, this panel was hilarious. Of course it should've been, what with five comedy writers, but comedy is so hit and miss sometimes. Probably the funniest up there was Amy Wallen, the moderator. She's this adorable gal with long brunette hair. Couldn't've been older than, say, thirty-five or so, although she needed reading glasses when looking at her notes.
In discussing her novels, Sarah talked about cutting out all of the one-liners when revising The Big Love. It felt forced to her, as there was already enough comedy with the situations and relationships in which the protagonist found herself. While revising Secrets to Happiness, she almost took them all out again but decided to leave in a few. She didn't think The Big Love would've suffered much if she'd left some in there as well.
When Amy asked them about how much of their own lives they inserted into their work, Sarah said without a doubt that The Big Love was very autobiographical. Of course that's not much revelation since it was her first novel. Many first novels contain a lot of the writer's own life. Sarah wasn't worried about that, but what nagged her about The Big Love is how shallow and shitty the men characters are. It's been five years since I read it, but I do kinda sorta remember the men getting short shrift. It didn't really bother me because the protagonist was hilarious. Plus, does anyone really expect well-drawn male characters in chick lit? At any rate, whether you expect it or not, Sarah made more effort in her follow-up to create men who are three-dimensional and sympathetic. That's cool, I look forward to reading it.
Maria Semple, as it turns out, is close pals with Sarah. She's about the same age, only brunette. They live near each other in New York City and hang out a lot. Like Sarah, she's got a lot of TV writing experience. They pretty much all do except Amy. This One Is Mine is Maria's first novel. While she was writing it, she'd call Sarah quite a bit for advice and feedback. Sarah told us that she'd call their mutual gal pals and wonder if Maria was doing all right and whether or not she was cut out for the fiction racket. Maria, for her part, says she loved the novel writing experience. The TV world is too brutal and competitive for her. She spoke a few minutes about that and couldn't emphasize enough the cut-throat atmosphere of working on a TV show writing staff. "I don't even want to repeat a lot of what people said to each other in the writing room." Wow, that bad, huh? It's funny, none of that would occur to me when watching my favorite shows.
Bill said he actually prefers writing for TV. Sure, working for Letterman could get competitive, but he didn't mind. It's just a TV show, right? Bill's in his fifties or so with glasses and graying hair. He referred to himself as a Jewish guy from Boston. I'm actually a longtime Letterman fan so it was kind of cool listening to his stories. You take the Top 10, for instance. If you just got one of your jokes as one of the ten on any given night, it was a badge of honor.
Everything Hurts might be an apt title. As with Maria, this is his fiction debut, but whereas Maria loved the peace and solitude of working on her novel, Bill couldn't stand writing for more than two hours. Not only did it strain his attention span, but it would leave him drained when heading out the door to the Ed Sullivan Theater in the afternoons. Even his wife would caution him from overdoing it. Apparently one time he'd worked pretty hard on his novel and then walked out the door looking completely dazed. His wife was afraid he'd get hit by a cab or something.
Bill's mom sounds as funny as her son. He told a couple hilarious anecdotes about her. She said she'd love him unconditionally, but first he had to earn it. And then this other time he was giving an interview on the radio in Boston about Everything Hurts and told Mom about it ahead of time so she could tune in. Well, she listened to the first part, but as soon as Bill started talking about the characters, Mom turned it off because, as she explained to her son, he was talking about people she didn't know.
Bill could be a stand-up comic. He tossed out a bunch of one-liners. As did Merrill. She'd be awesome at stand-up herself. She even looks funny. In her fifties like Bill, she's got this head overflowing with bushy black hair. And she wears these huge tinted glasses. Her main thing was about her dogs. Merrill's got four dogs who mostly lounge around the same room she writes in all day. At one point she thought about writing a story from the point of view of a dog. Let's say you've got this woman with a dog whose husband just left her. She's baffled as to why he'd leave, but then the dog asks her, "Didn't you ever smell the other woman on his pants?" Stuff like that. Merrill had us all rolling on our asses with her dog shtick.
Merrill wasn't as facetious as she seemed at first. Why not write a story with a sympathetic dog? Amy asked all of them if they were sympathetic with all of their characters, even the bad guys or the characters the readers aren't supposed to like. They all agreed unanimously that yep, since they sort of give birth to all these people in their heads, they sympathize with all of them, including and sometimes especially the antagonists. Maria was especially passionate about this. It's impossible not to be sympathetic with everyone in her book, she said.
As soon as the panel was over, I hurried out to the corresponding tents, scooped up a copy of Secrets to Happiness, and waited for Sarah. I was second in line. This was probably the highlight of the weekend because when it was my turn to get my book signed, Sarah and I chatted at length. We're talking five or ten minutes or so. The people behind me never complained. They must not have had other panels to go to because I may have complained in their shoes. Anyway, Sarah's originally from Arizona but went to college at Penn, the other side of Philly from Temple U., where I went. I told her how I'd seen her five years earlier when she was plugging The Big Love at Vroman's. She asked me about my writing. I told her that she should come back to the Book Fest next year and that it was the best weekend to be in L.A. A photographer from Getty Images snapped our photo while we were chatting. And we talked about other stuff. It was awesome. She's a cool chick.
Fiction: Exiles and Outsiders
Young CS 50 - Noon
Gioconda Belli - Originally from Nicaragua, Belli's poetry and fiction have been published all over the world. Her works include the bestseller The Inhabited Woman. Her latest novel is Infinity in the Palm of Her Hand: A Novel of Adam and Eve.
Aimee Bender - Author of three books: The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, An Invisible Sign of My Own, which was a 2000 Los Angeles Times pick of the year, and Willful Creatures. Bender lives in L.A. and teaches creative writing at USC.
Mary Gaitskill - Best-selling author of the novel Veronica and, most recently, the story collection Don't Cry. She has written three award-winning story collections, including Because They Wanted To and Bad Behavior.
Dylan Landis - Author of Normal People Don't Live Like This, a novel-in-stories forthcoming in September. Her fiction has appeared in Do Me: Tales of Sex and Love from Tin House and Best American Nonrequired Reading.
Moderator: Carolyn Kellogg - Lead blogger at the Los Angeles Times book blog Jacket Copy, as well as a writer of book reviews. She blogs about books and more at carolynkellogg.com. Her radio stories have been heard on NPR.
Notes
This was my least favorite panel. I didn't say it was bad, okay? I'm not sure I've ever attended a panel in my ten years going to the Book Fest that I'd qualify as bad. When you attend eight panels, though, and then you rank them, one of them's gotta be at the bottom, right? Well, here you go. Remember how I said that you can discover talent when you attend panels that include authors you've never heard of? Well, there's a flipside to that coin: You can also attend panels that are sort of underwhelming and don't include anyone who's engaging.
That fact, coupled with riding a high from my awesome chat with Sarah, meant that I wasn't paying attention very much. When I decided to get a ticket to this panel a week ago, it wasn't clear to me what was meant by Exiles and Outsiders. But again, maybe I'd discover something or someone interesting. Nah. And what's more, I don't think anyone on the panel really knew what it meant.
Perhaps the best thing about this panel was that Gioconda and Mary kept squaring off about one thing or another, including the idea that we're born alone. Gioconda posited that we're all born alone, and then Mary piped in with her opinion that of course we're not born alone. Our mom's right there. The doctor's there. Nurses. Come on. We're hardly alone when we're born.
Aimee Bender, the only author on this panel I'd heard of, tried to address the panel title. She said that in fiction, the protagonist usually has to be an outsider in some way, shape, or form. The protagonist is the one who's observing, and what better way to make keen observations than to be an outsider? And having an outsider, almost by definition, is a great way to engender conflict. It's the conflict that makes any novel's world go round.
Dylan said something interesting, speaking of outsider-observers. She talked about a friend of hers whom she's known for years, this guy who's very extroverted and has a ton of friends. At least she assumed he was an extrovert. As it turns out, this guy just confided in her recently that he has to keep reminding himself that he's not alone. Interesting, huh?
Seriously, though, back to that whole thing about being born alone, their discussion really did get metaphysical at one point, talking about birth and so forth and that we can't get beyond our bodies and that's why we all feel so alone. Gioconda said it's like kissing through a handkerchief. I never would've thought of solitude that way, but it was obvious to me that this woman's got a very unique sensibility. I take it back, what I said about not engaging with any of the authors on this panel. I'd love to get to know Gioconda. She talked about being exiled from Nicaragua and how that was the impetus for writing about Adam and Eve. "God creates so much and then forgets about it," she said. Did I mention that this panel could get kind of deep?
The conversation veered away from the panel's title when they started talking about their writing process. Mary, for instance, said she churns out her first drafts as quickly as possible. That's cool. So do I. It's nice to see an award-winning fiction writer approach her stuff the same way I do. I don't remember what the others said on this topic. That must mean they said things I couldn't relate to, like, "I take my dandy old time writing first drafts and get all obsessive over each and every page and don't move on to the next page until I'm satisfied." No one said that. Or if they did, I don't remember. As I said, this wasn't the best panel.
Fiction: New West
Young CS 50 - 1:30 p.m.
Marianne Wiggins - Wiggins is the author of ten books of fiction including Evidence of Things Unseen, for which she was nominated for a National Book Award as well as named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her most recent novel is The Shadow Catcher, which was a finalist for the 2007 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction.
Nina Revoyr - An Edgar Award-nominated author, Revoyr was born in Tokyo and grew up in Japan, Wisconsin and Los Angeles. She is the author of three award-winning novels. Her most recent, The Age of Dreaming, is a finalist for the 2008 Mystery/Thriller Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Marisa Silver - Silver has written a collection of award-winning short stories called Babe in Paradise as well as No Direction Home, her debut novel. Silver's latest novel, The God of War, is nominated for a 2008 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction.
Moderator: Susan Salter Reynolds - Reynolds is a Los Angeles Times staff writer. She writes the Discoveries column for the Books section as well as frequent full-length reviews. She is a regular contributor to the Calendar section of the Los Angeles Times.
Notes
Susan Salter Reynolds is someone I try to see at every Book Fest if I can. As it says in her bio above, she writes a section in every Sunday book review called Discoveries. It's basically two or three capsule reviews of books you'd otherwise never hear about. I've been reading her reviews pretty much since I first moved out here and subscribed to the L.A. Times in '98. I first saw her in person at the Book Fest in 2002 when she had a one-on-one interview with Steve Martin in Royce Hall. Steve had just finished a draft of The Pleasure of My Company, his follow-up to Shopgirl. He brought in pages and read them and talked about them and otherwise made us all laugh our asses off. Susan, though, kept a calm composure. I remember being really impressed by that. I haven't seen her at every Book Fest since, but I've tried to. I've seen her at a few. Last year she was all set to moderate this one panel, I forget the topic, but she ended up skipping the whole weekend because of the flu or something. Yes, I was pretty disappointed.
Michael J. Fox - It's Alex P. Keaton!
Fiction: New West
Young CS 50 - 1:30 p.m.
Marianne Wiggins - Wiggins is the author of ten books of fiction including Evidence of Things Unseen, for which she was nominated for a National Book Award as well as named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her most recent novel is The Shadow Catcher, which was a finalist for the 2007 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction.
Nina Revoyr - An Edgar Award-nominated author, Revoyr was born in Tokyo and grew up in Japan, Wisconsin and Los Angeles. She is the author of three award-winning novels. Her most recent, The Age of Dreaming, is a finalist for the 2008 Mystery/Thriller Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Marisa Silver - Silver has written a collection of award-winning short stories called Babe in Paradise as well as No Direction Home, her debut novel. Silver's latest novel, The God of War, is nominated for a 2008 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction.
Moderator: Susan Salter Reynolds - Reynolds is a Los Angeles Times staff writer. She writes the Discoveries column for the Books section as well as frequent full-length reviews. She is a regular contributor to the Calendar section of the Los Angeles Times.
Notes
Susan Salter Reynolds is someone I try to see at every Book Fest if I can. As it says in her bio above, she writes a section in every Sunday book review called Discoveries. It's basically two or three capsule reviews of books you'd otherwise never hear about. I've been reading her reviews pretty much since I first moved out here and subscribed to the L.A. Times in '98. I first saw her in person at the Book Fest in 2002 when she had a one-on-one interview with Steve Martin in Royce Hall. Steve had just finished a draft of The Pleasure of My Company, his follow-up to Shopgirl. He brought in pages and read them and talked about them and otherwise made us all laugh our asses off. Susan, though, kept a calm composure. I remember being really impressed by that. I haven't seen her at every Book Fest since, but I've tried to. I've seen her at a few. Last year she was all set to moderate this one panel, I forget the topic, but she ended up skipping the whole weekend because of the flu or something. Yes, I was pretty disappointed.
Nina's another gal I try to catch every year, although she doesn't go nearly as far back with me as Susan does. I first came across Nina two years ago on a panel about writing while holding down a day job. That panel also included Steve Lopez, who's in the limelight now because of the movie The Soloist, based on one of his Points West columns for the L.A. Times. Of course at that time I had no idea he'd sold one of his articles to Hollyweird, nor that Robert Downey Jr., of all people, would play him. Steve Lopez is a soft-bellied white-haired guy. He looks nothing like Robert Downey. But whatever. I'm digressing.
Even if I knew about The Soloist back then, Nina would've still been the standout for me. She's a tall, olive-skinned, bespectacled, thirtysomething gal equipped with a very eloquent schoolmaster's voice. If that makes any sense. In other words, she has this sort of firm, authoritative tone, paired with an adorable face with black-framed glasses. It's almost like she's cute against her will. It's funny, I've yet to read any of Nina's novels. I've read excerpts, and the writing definitely is strong, which I sort of figured it would be based on how articulate she is. When I first met her two years ago, she only had two novels to her credit. The second one, Southland, was named one of the best books of the year by the L.A. Times. Just before the Book Fest last year, she finally and at long last published her third novel.
Nina's a working woman. Her novels seem critic proof yet I suppose they haven't been selling well enough to live on. She's got a nine-to-five day job at a nonprofit. She has to find time very early in the morning and/or at night to work on her stuff. That's awesome. In a strange way, it's comforting to know she's achieved so much success with her writing yet still has a life pretty much like mine. Of course, viewed another way, it might be depressing. Are you telling me that I could write a novel that's named one of the best books of the year, and I'll still have to keep burning the oil?
Yet another cool thing about Nina is that she didn't know anyone who helped her achieve success. Like me, she cold-queried people with letters and phone calls. And it was with one such call that she convinced an agent to look at her material. Cool, huh? Shit, if Nina can make it that way, there's hope for all of us. I forget the name of the panel I saw her on last year. It was a fiction panel like this one but, like the panel just before this, it had one of those goofy subtitles that doesn't necessarily mean anything. And I got to chat her up a bit afterward at one of the sponsor tents, Vroman's or Book Soup or one of those kats. Unfortunately I didn't have time to talk to her after today's panel. I had to haul ass to the Michael J. Fox event. More on that later.
Marianne Wiggins is yet another repeat author from last year, when she'd just published her novel The Shadow Catcher. Well, now The Shadow Catcher has just come out in paperback, giving her another excuse to show up here and plug it. Marianne's a great talker. Hell, they all are. Writers are often the most well-spoken people you'll ever meet. Marianne, though, she's like the super-literate grandmother you never had. One thing I learned about her at today's panel that I didn't know last year is that she lived in England for a good long while, almost twenty years. She mentioned this when talking about how tough fiction writers have it these days. When she was in her thirties, about thirty years ago or so, you could make a decent living as a fiction writer. Writers in Europe today are doing better than their American counterparts. In the Scandic countries, writers get royalties even when their books are checked out of libraries. In Ireland writers and other artists don't have to pay taxes. I knew there was a reason I loved Ireland.
This isn't an issue for Marisa. Her fiction hasn't sold well enough for her to live on, but fortunately for her, she's married to a man who's done very well in his line of work. She didn't elaborate on that, but I've since done my research. Her husband is Ken Kwapis, a movie and TV director. You ever see Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants? He directed that. And he's directed episodes for The Office and a bunch more. So yes, I can see why Marisa doesn't need to work. Another thing I didn't know until after the panel is that Marisa used to make movies herself. She made her first feature when she was in her early twenties studying at Harvard. It won the top prize at Sundance. And then she made that movie He Said, She Said with Kevin Bacon and Elizabeth Perkins. That's pretty cool. She and Ken made that together.
Susan asked them how they decide on the plots of their novels, a fair question since these three authors represent quite a broad range of subjects. Marisa referenced her latest one, which is set in the 1970s Salton Sea. She talked about reading somewhere about trailer parks on the Salton Sea and how people preferred to live there. They'd live in trailers right on the edge of the sea itself. Fascinating. Marisa's protagonist Aries is based on such people.
The main character of Nina's newest novel, The Age of Dreaming, is a Japanese silent movie star from the 1920s. She said it wasn't as hard as you'd think for her to walk in the shoes of someone like that. For starters, the nonprofit where she works is located inside the former home of a Japanese silent film star. How cool is that? So she can do some research right there, just going to work every day. More research included reading about how the Japanese were targeted for racial discrimination in the 1920s, something she'd be sensitive to, being half-Japanese. She talked about how in the 1940s Santa Monica Beach was racially segregated. The Asians and whites weren't allowed to hang out together. Man, you talk about a different world from today. Also, Nina's protagonist is a Japanese guy in his seventies who's telling his story to the reader many decades after it happened. Nina's father just so happens to be a Japanese guy in his seventies. That especially made it easy for her to write in such a voice. In fact, speaking of voices, Nina talked about giving a reading last year when the book had just come out. After the reading, her father commented that the protagonist sounded an awful lot like him. She had to reassure him he wasn't. This led Nina to talk about her own childhood, which was split between Wisconsin and Tokyo. She said it didn't matter where they lived, she never felt like she fit in. This is what made her extra-sensitive to hearing about how the Japanese in 1920s L.A. were so targeted. Not fitting in is also how she fell into books. As you'd imagine, reading helped her escape the doldrums.
One thing that struck me was when Nina talked about life after Southland won that huge award. At the time that happened in 2000, she was thirty years old and felt drained and exhausted and that her career was over. You should've seen Susan's expression at that. I'm guessing Susan's pushing fifty, and hearing someone much younger talk about being burned out must've taken her aback. Shit, it took me aback and I'm six years younger than Nina. Anyway, that's one reason it took seven years for her to write her third novel. She had to recover from Southland. Another thing that struck me was when she said she always felt like an amateur when starting a new novel. Marisa said this too. And they all said they felt like a different person when starting a new work, whatever that means. Although, as a writer myself, I have a feeling that has to do with trying to relate to a new protagonist.
In Marianne's newest book, The Shadow Catcher, the protagonist is a real person, photographer Edward Curtis. He's famous for a lot of Old West photography in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Marianne has two plots going, one revolving around Edward's wife and another around a fictional version of herself. Hmmm..... Okay. Anyway, as for how she arrived at Edward as a protagonist, Marianne talked about her daughter Lara being a professional photographer. Lara is especially into black and white photography. Thanks to that, Marianne's known of Edward Curtis for a long time and has always toyed with the idea of using him and his wife as characters in a novel. As for why she'd cast herself as a character, I'm not sure. But hey, if it works, go with it, right? It's interesting that she'd use herself as a character because she said that writing a novel provided just as much escape for her as reading does.
Susan's husband and kids were sitting in the front row, which I thought was nice. I'd never seen her bring her family before. Her one daughter, who was maybe ten, asked a question at the very end of the session about how much of the story they each had in mind by the time they sat down to start writing. I can't remember if Nina answered. Marisa said she'd have a nugget of an idea and that the first draft would help her figure it all out. Marianne's only requirement before starting is knowing the end.
Michael J. Fox in conversation with Mary McNamara
Ackerman Ballroom - 3 p.m.Michael J. Fox - It's Alex P. Keaton!
Interviewer: Mary McNamara - Mary's worked for the Los Angeles Times for nineteen years, writing extensively about the inner workings of Hollywood. She lives in L.A. with her hubby and three kids. Oscar Season is her debut novel.
Notes
Now how cool is this? To cap off another awesome weekend, I got to see in person for the first time a man with whom I practically grew up in the eighties. Alex P. Keaton! The shameless Republican son of hippie parents! Are you kidding? I never missed an episode. It was the second show on Thursday nights when NBC had that dream lineup: The Cosby Show, Family Ties, Cheers, and Night Court. I never did watch much of his nineties stuff, like Spin City, but I thought he was hilarious in The American President and The Frighteners. As for Mary, she's the main TV critic for the L.A. Times. I've been reading her reviews for years. Her tastes are compatible with mine so I always take her reviews to heart.
I was sitting too far back to see if Mike was twitching very much. I could definitely hear his voice tremble a little. Of course that could've been stage fright. This ballroom is huge, and it was filled to capacity for this event. Whatever the case, Parkinson's hasn't slowed down Mike's TV work. Dude's still at it, most recently with a guest stint on Rescue Me. That was one of the first things Mary asked him about. Mike and Denis Leary have been friends ever since they met on a talk show many eons ago. They're both hardcore hockey fans. In case you didn't know, Mike's Canadian. In fact, before he fell into acting, his dream was to play in the NHL. Anyway, to get him on Rescue Me, Denis just called Mike directly and said he wanted Mike to play a paraplegic. While at first that might not seem like much of a stretch, Mike explained that the opposite is true. Paraplegics are nothing like Parkinson's patients. Whereas paraplegics literally can't move a muscle, with Parkinson's your muscles are going haywire, what with the twitches and involuntary kicks and so on. Mike said Denis knew this when he offered him the job. "He's a sick guy that way," Mike said.
While Mike was talking about paralysis versus Parkinson's, we had our own health scare in the audience. I had a hard time seeing from far back, but apparently an elderly woman up front passed out. It took me a while to make sense of it. One minute Mike's talking about Rescue Me, the next an old guy stands up near the front and yells for someone to get a doctor. And then we all just sat there while a medic showed up to help. Luckily the Book Fest keeps such people around just in case. Not to worry, the woman recovered, and she even insisted we get on with the show. That's awesome. I mean seriously, I was kind of scared.
As you'd expect, Mary didn't waste much time in asking Mike about the Parkinson's backstory. I'm glad she did. I knew he'd held off on telling the public for a while, but I was never clear on how long he'd waited. Well, today he said he first noticed symptoms in 1990. 1990! That's crazy, just a year after Family Ties ended and just after he did the second and third Back to the Future films. Damn. And then the official diagnosis came the following year, when he was thirty. Mike said it then took him another two years to accept it. Can you imagine? Two years of denial while the symptoms manifest themselves twitch by twitch? Even after he accepted it, he kept it under wraps for several more years. Meanwhile he did stuff like The American President, The Frighteners, and Spin City. Mike did two seasons of Spin City before he finally went public with his condition. During those two seasons he said one of his tactics to camouflage his symptoms was to keep that twitching left hand in his pocket as much as possible. He'd also do things like lean against a desk or walk a certain way. One anecdote he related was about how, shooting this one scene on Spin City, he was required to walk through a door the same time as someone else was walking through in the other direction. The way he told it, his brain had a tough time doing that. And so during rehearsals, he'd tell the other actor to hurry up and get through the doorway before he had to. Of course that other actor had no idea why Mike would want that, but Mike had to be insistent, which in turn made the other guy think he was a weirdo.
Mike's a busy man, and not just because of Rescue Me. He did an interview with Katie Couric recently. Katie's dad has Parkinson's, which is why she instinctively knew Mike would need help straightening his tie before the interview. For his part, Mike said he kept his hand on his leg during the interview so he wouldn't accidently kick her. He said he's "kicked a lot of people in a lot of places." Hilarious. He was also on Letterman earlier this month. Did I mention he was busy? His wife Tracy is busy too. She just went to South Africa for a Lifetime movie. She's directed episodes of Medium. They met, by the way, on Family Ties. They got married in '88, just before the seventh and final season.
Mike and Tracy have four kids. The youngest is seven. The middle two are twin girls who start high school this fall. And the oldest is in college, also a girl. Mike joked about her using the disability loophole when applying, saying she was related to someone with a disability, or that she was first-generation American. As for Mike himself, he'll be forty-eight this June. Man, he so does not look forty-eight.
Speaking of his kids, he gave a lot of credit to his oldest, Sam, who turns twenty next month. Back in the mid nineties when she was six or so, she convinced him to get his GED. Mike also talked about how he and Tracy got a lot of flak for having another child in their forties, but he said he loves having the kids around. Screw the critics.
As you may have picked up by now, Mike's hilarious. It's no accident. For starters, comedy's his background. He also said he makes an effort to be an optimist at all times, Parkinson's be damned. He just did a TV documentary in Bhutan of all places, a country whose government actually includes a Minister of Happiness. Still, Mike has his bad days like we all do. You can't escape your gene pool, right? And for him, that would be his hot Irish temper. Nonetheless, when his younger kids leave for school in the morning, he tells them to "choose to be happy." Not surprisingly, he says his kids hate it when he says that. As for how he and Tracy even have the time to raise their kids, Mike compared it to war. Not in a bad way. Mostly in a boring way. Raising kids involves very long, interminable stretches of boredom and nothingness. And then chaos erupts when he and Tracy suddenly have a lot to do in terms of their TV and movie careers.
One of the most interesting factoids I learned today about Mike is that his father-in-law, Tracy's dad, is none other than author Michael Pollan. You ever hear of him? I wouldn't have any idea if not for my father's ongoing dieting adventures. My father seems to discover a new food book every year, and more than one have been by this guy named Michael Pollan, books like The Botany of Desire, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto. When Mike wrote his first memoir, Lucky Man, a few years ago, his father-in-law became his writing mentor. Mike said he couldn't've done it without him. He also helped with this new one that just came out last month, Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist. Mike confessed to having days while working on this second memoir when he didn't know how he was going to finish it. Thank God for Michael Pollan, huh?
