Vibrant Nation

my bio

When I was 60 years old, I wrote a book for my children. I have five children. They never thought I had a life before I was their mother. Sometimes even I wondered.

I didn’t know it but a friend sent a copy of my book to a publisher. The publisher called me and said she wanted to publisher my book and would give me an advance that had a comma in it. I think I fainted.

The book was Love, Loss and What I Wore. It was a memoir that told about growing up in Manhattan in the 1930s, 40s and 50s through the clothes I wore. It sold over 100,000 copies.

At 62, my second book, What We Do For Love was published. It’s about having expectations of finding Prince Charming when you’re young  (after all, in the movies when I was growing up everybody found true love—Minnie Mouse found Mickey, Ginger Rogers found Fred Astaire, Lauren Bacall found Bogey, and one enchanted evening Mary Martin found Enzo Pinza across a crowded room).

At 65, my third book, Mother of the Bride: The Dream, The Reality, The Search For The Perfect Dress, was published. It’s about a year of planning a daughter’s wedding, and the mother-daughter relationship. Childbirth is a lot easier than being mother-of-the-bride.

At 70, my fourth book, Makeovers at the Beauty Counter of Happiness was published, which included letters (unsent) to Gwyneth Paltrow, Sarah Jessica Parker, Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, and Mother Teresa, and to my eleven-year-old granddaughter.

Algonquin Books published all of my books. Staying with one publisher and one editor is unusual these days. I’ve been lucky.

I have had a major review in The New York Times, and have received very positive reviews on everything from MTV to Modern Maturity. I’ve
been on Oprah, and my books have been translated into French, German, Portugese, Spanish, Japanese and other languages I also can’t speak.

I have written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Ladies Home Journal, Victoria Magazine, Weight Watchers Magazine, and many others.. I have contributed essays to Crown Books for young girls, and taught seminars at the Teen Arts Festival at the College of New Jersey.

I‘ve gone on four national book tours and spoken to hundreds of women’s groups throughout the country. I have been the keynote speaker at fund raisers for as many as1,000 people, and am just as happy speaking to women’s book clubs with ten members.

I illustrate all of my books and show women how to write their own visual-verbal memoirs.

If somebody had told me all these things would happen to me after 60, I would have told them to stop smoking whatever they were smoking.

my VN interview

• How did you get to where you are now?

  I never get sick, but I had a bladder infection and I was lying in bed, which I wasn’t used to doing, and there was nothing on t.v. and I had nothing to read. All of a sudden, the dress I wore when I was a kid came into my mind.  My mother sewed all my clothes, and that dress just popped into my mind. 

  It started with a memory
  Now, in those days, we didn’t have a lot of Kodak moments, so there were no pictures. Oh, I really enjoyed looking at this dress in my mind and I thought, “Can I think of another one?”  So, all of a sudden, this whole album came back to me of all the dresses my mother had made.  And then, I thought, "I’m going to draw them.”  I’m not an artist, but there were no pictures, and I thought, “Well, I want to get them down," because, indeed, if you’re over 60, and you don’t write it down, it’s gone.

  So I drew them, and I was so happy because I was thinking about my mother, who had died when she was 43.  (I think a lot of people whose moms died early are amazed that they lived longer than their mothers did. We're all going to go to heaven or wherever, and we’re going to see our mothers – and we'll be older than they are!)

  So I looked at all these drawings I made and I thought, “Oh, wow.  This is like the story of my life growing up.”  And I thought, “I’m going to put some words around the drawings and make copies for my kids." I have six children, five still alive. (I went to a baby loss meeting and was amazed, because there were women there who had had miscarriages.  They were devastated, yet other people kept saying to them, “Don’t worry.  You’ll have another child.”  But it’s not the same.) 

  A gift to my kids
  Anyway, I wanted to give it to my kids because my kids never thought I had a life before I was their mother. You know, this is who I am, I am this older person who’s always telling them what to do and what not to do, but I used to be like them.

  So I went to Staples and made copies and I thought, “Oh, God! I’m spending $50 making copies!” And I put them in a binder and gave it to my kids, and I was really happy. 

  So, three daughters thought, “Oh, this is fun.”  And my sons didn’t know what to do with it.  And that was that.  I made something with my love, and I gave it to my kids. But in it, I mentioned my grandmother and my friend’s mother and my Aunt Babbie. You know,  when you’re with your children, you generally talk about them.  The minute you start to say, “Oh, you know, when I was your age,” they get that look on their face like you’re going to talk about Abraham Lincoln going to school. That's why I wanted to get it written down.

  So, that was that.  And then a year later, this woman called me up from Algonquin and said, “Somebody wants to publish your book.  Be nice to her.”  A friend had sent a copy to her cousin, and her cousin sent it to a publisher.

  Unexpected success
  I was devastated.  I mean, I was a 60-year-old grandmother from New Jersey who had never done anything.  My name was only in the paper for birth announcements.  I had never been groped by a politician. I hadn’t saved the rainforest.  I was just a lady in line in the A&P.  Plus, I was really very shy.  I was very shy up until I was 60.

  But then I was involved in book publishing, which, of course, involves book marketing. And they sent me out on tour, and I was sitting with Pulitzer Prize winners and those lawyers whose books become movies.  And people were buying more of my books.  And it wasn’t because of my exciting life; it was because they could find their own life, and it was another way for them to identify their story.  So it’s like I have two lives now:  I have my real life, which is with my children and then I go out and people are asking for my autograph.

  It’s really hard to change your own impression of yourself after high school. That’s who you are.  But when I went on book tour, women would come up afterward and talk quite frankly with me. And I was becoming older than most of the people I was talking to, and they were looking for advice, confirmation, role models, whatever.  So I wrote three other books, because I thought, “Nobody really tells the truth about the average woman’s life, yet we have so much more in common than all that superficial stuff, like what size you’re wearing, what your education is, what your income level is." All of that is superficial compared to the emotional parts of life and one's life experience.

  The play
  Nora Ephron had read my book when it first came out, and I guess she liked it.  And then, two or three years later, she optioned it.  Now, famous people like that, I think they option a lot of properties, so it was very flattering but I didn’t think anything would happen to it.  I guess I’m a pessimistic optimist or an optimistic pessimist or something.  And then they were going to do a play about it, because it doesn’t really have a plot.  So their solution has been wonderful with these little vignettes, like, as Nora says, “The Vagina Monologues without vaginas.”

  And then she did the movie Julie & Julia.  And when that was over, she picked it up again.  It makes you feel good, because you feel a part of this sisterhood.  And you’re all laughing at the same things because you can identify with them.  There's a line in the play that goes something like, "There was never a good time to be heavy, particularly in the 60s.  Why?  Because of Audrey Hepburn."

  The play is sort of like a Greek chorus. They used my story as the commonality, taking little vignettes and then coming back to my story. So my story is like the narrator. 

  The other thing that I thought was kind of interesting when I wrote the book for my kids, I stopped at this maternity dress I had, because, after you have children, you don’t care what you wear, you care what they wear.  But the publisher wanted me to finish with the story of my life up to that point, and that was scary, because I drew the pictures in the book, and I thought, “Oh, God! I'm not an artist. I've never taken art lessons. I just doodle. But now I have to draw pictures for real people, not just my family,” – and I started to work on these new drawings.

  I sent them to the publisher, who called me up immediately and said, “We hate your new drawings.  They’re so professional.  We like your other ones.”  So this should encourage women to just draw.  I think we all went to school, in elementary school, with someone who could render things very, very well, and we never picked up a Magic Marker or a paintbrush.  And it’s a wonderful way of expressing yourself without being hard on yourself—again.

  The other part of the play I loved so much was a bit from the book about my mother and all the words your mother has said to you, like, “If you’d only cut your hair, stand up straight, put on some lipstick, lose five pounds, gain five pounds, etc.” It’s a universal thing.

  The play is delightful. It’s not my play; it's Nora and Delia’s play.  And I think they’ve added so much to it.  I really enjoy it.  When I first saw it, I was practically on the floor, because they mentioned my name and my different marriages and so forth.  And I thought, “Oh, God!” – you know, “Why did I let anybody know about this history?” 

  But then, it’s not me, because a book is a book, and a play is a play, and having all these different actresses is so wonderful because they’re all giving their own interpretations of things.  And the Ephrons’ play is absolutely delightful, because it's touching on things that we've all done.

  Like being in a dressing room and saying, “But I always wear a size 10. Why is the light so bad in here?  I’m going to lose five pounds in May.”  And her wonderful line about sleeveless turtleneck sweaters:  "Are you hot or are you cold?" I mean, every time I hear that, I just break up!

  And they have the touching stories about a woman going through a mastectomy, and a gay marriage, and—it’s life.

• How do you see yourself differently now than you did 10 years ago?

  When the book was published and started selling, it felt like an accident.  I didn’t feel like an author.  I couldn’t claim being an author.  I’m kind of slowly now doing it, but at first I would go into a Barnes & Noble or someplace and I would see the classics, Saul Bellow, Shakespeare, Dickens, Roth.  And then there’s Ilene Beckerman’s book! I felt like it was an accident, a freaky kind of thing that happens once in a while. 

  I started to feel I had something to say
  But then, in talking with women, I really felt I had something to say to them -- and I had never had anything to say before because I was so shy.  I used to use paper to fool around drawing or write teenage poems but I hid them.  I’m sorry, now, that I was so hard on myself, because maybe I would have made a difference in somebody’s life.  I think older women -- really any woman -- can make a difference in someone else’s life. I still remember being this painfully shy kid in elementary school, and a teacher went by and smiled at me and patted my head.  Now that’s nothing, right? But it made me feel so good, that warmth.

  I felt like Alice in Wonderland after the book came out because I would be flying around and people would be greeting me, and it was just an amazing experience.  I kept saying and saying to other women, “If this can happen to me, anything can happen to anybody.”

  But you just have to do it.  You can’t hide it.  If you want to find yourself a date, don’t sit in your house.  You’ve got to go out there and present yourself.  You can’t wait for the phone to ring, because it’s not going to.

  When I book toured, I was supposed to be giving out stuff, but I get so much back, because, honestly, women do share.  It's like when there were professional taxidrivers, and you’d tell him the most intimate stories because you’d never see him again.  Women just share the truth.  And I learned so much. It's been a remarkable experience for me.  It’s been a very humbling experience.  It's made me feel less weird than I used to, like "Other people feel like this!"

  What’s going on here?
  I find that women are so hard on each other.  I don’t think most men really care exactly what your shoes look like or whether you’re wearing dangling earrings or not. They don’t really care about that.  They care about a woman being comfortable with herself, someone that’s fun to be with, and intelligent, and who cares about them. And we say,“Oh, God, I have to lose five pounds.  And is this the right shade of lipstick?”  Who are we doing this for?  I think we have to have fun with that stuff but not live to shop.

  I’m writing a book now about my grandmother, amazing woman, never got past the third grade, and she’d say to me all the time, “Spend more time thinking about your insides than what you’re wearing outside."

  I think the times change.  If we look at our magazines, they are trying to get more subscribers.  But who do they put on the cover of magazines today?  They put on movie stars and celebrities and this and that.  I spoke once at an Ivy League dinner and, afterwards, went out with these three girls for coffee.  This was maybe 10 years ago, but it could have been 1957.  Because these were highly educated, beautiful girls, who were still talking about not being pleased with their looks -- or that they weren't married yet.  And I thought, “What’s going on here?”  I just find women are so hard on themselves, and that, on the other hand, that women are so supportive of other women.

  The "M" words and the sisterhood
  I think there’s a whole bunch of “M” words that women have in common.  It starts with menstruation, and then you get married, and then it’s motherhood, mother of the bride, mother of the groom, mother-in-law, then you go into menopause—so this is all stuff we have in common.

  The sisterhood is really, really there, and we’re there when we go through divorce and when we go through death—all those things. I always say, “Who would you rather spend Saturday afternoon with?  Your husband or your best friend?”  And it’s usually your best friend.

  What to wear
  My mother and grandmother’s generation pretty much established a way of dressing as an adult woman and never changed, whereas my generation was probably the first of women who wore dramatically different kinds of clothes .

  There are certain things you can’t buy any more.  You can’t really buy an apron that looks like the apron that your grandmother wore.  You can buy an apron to barbecue with, or something like that, but women don’t do that anymore. My mother-in-law walked around with a dish towel over her shoulder.  That’s the play of it – who do you want to be:  Betty or Veronica in the Archie Comics?

  When I was young, I changed the color of my hair for fun. I was a redhead, or an Irish Celtic with dark hair, and so forth.  But then when it got grey, I thought, “Well, I don’t want to be a 70-year-old blonde.”

  So I have a strange way of dressing at this point.  I started to wear a head kerchief so I wouldn't have to deal with my hair. I let my hair grow and I wear this head kerchief. It's just a piece of fabric and yet Muslims think I’m a Muslim, Orthodox Jews think I’m Orthodox, and ladies who have gone through chemo think I’ve gone through chemo.

  And this is just a piece of fabric!  What a difference this has made! I don’t want to be a suburban this or an old lady that or a senior citizen this. I just want to be a nice person that helps other people.  Because my one secret of life is that, when you’re out helping somebody, it makes you feel good.

  One of my great joys in life is when my grandkids come over. They’ll all say, "Can’t find the other red sock? Wear a blue sock.”  Drives their mothers crazy, like the worst thing in the world is that your socks don’t match.

  About the money
  As for the money side, well, I’m still a woman of the '50s, so I’m still, basically, a good girl and a people pleaser. When people ask me to do something, I always say, “Yes.”  I can fight for somebody else, but I do not do it for myself.  I do not have a lawyer.  I do not have an agent.  I could market myself a lot more, but I’m much more interested in doing the creative work rather than the marketing part.  My good feelings really come from writing the book, rather than the rest of it.

  It’s like when you’re pregnant, and the baby’s inside of you, and it doesn’t matter if somebody likes it or doesn’t like it. 

  You know, I used to have an advertising agency, and I’d do a layout, and the client would say, “Oh yeah, but I don’t like blue eyes.  Make them green.”  And because they’re paying for it, you make them green. But when I’m writing, I don’t pay attention to the business side.

  Two of my children have medical problems, and that’s what I do with the money.  I certainly don’t need anything.  I do not need another pair of shoes.  I don’t wear jewelry.  I don’t go on vacations.  I don’t have a fancy car.  So to me, money should be used to help people who don’t have it.

• Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

  I hope I’m alive. I’m 74½; I had my nose pierced about five years ago. The reason that I had it pierced was that I have a chickenpox scar on my nose, and people kept saying, “Oh, you have your nose pierced.”  But I didn’t.  And I always wanted it done.  And I thought, “Well, what the heck?”  So I had it done.  I walked around this store in the Village about five times before I had enough nerve to go in, because I won’t even begin to tell you what other things they were piercing in this store.

  But now, I have decided that as you get older, if you obey the golden rule and you pay your taxes and you follow traffic rules, you can do whatever you want.

  I’m writing because I want to get a lot of stuff in. At my age, you never know. You have today and you have tomorrow. You know, maybe I’m writing for the world the stuff that I really want my children to know. When we try telling our kids anything, they just say, “That’s Mom saying that again.”  You know how all moms say, “Oh, darling, you look so beautiful.”  And the kid says, “Yeah, you’re just saying that because you’re my mom.”  Well, maybe that’s my way of getting to my children. I can say, “Look, there’s somebody out there paying attention to me.  You should, too.”

a postcard to my younger self

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my role models

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