Giving Thanks

JAN BROGAN:  Thursday is Thanksgiving, and it's tempting to ask everyone what she is grateful for. But let's not talk about our husbands or our families, good friends or the fact we have roofs to sleep under and food to eat.

Let's talk about Paula Broadwell.

 I am really grateful I am not Paula Broadwell.  Not because I would have been  found out as a cheater.  Nor that I apparently couldn't cut my doctoral thesis at the Harvard Kennedy School. And not because my biceps couldn't possibly be that defined without steroid use. But because I can't think of anything more humiliating than getting caught threatening some other girl to stay away from my guy.

Even in junior high school, when catty behavior was all the rage, I was not a fan of passing nasty notes.  But imagine being a grown up and having the FBI find all your nasty notes?  Imagine the entire world learning that you tried to scare off your competition?

So how about you Reds? Are you really happy you aren't Paula Broadwell? Or are you grateful you are not someone else?  On the positive side, Paula has  lived an exciting life. Do you think being beautiful, brilliant, and close to power might be worth the price? And is she a good basis for a character? A woman smart enough to graduate from Westpoint, but stupid enough to put her catty little snit in print?

ROSEMARY HARRIS: I'm just sorry that any of this story is seeping, unbidden, into my brain. When I could be thinking about the Elmo sex scandal. Which I originally thought involved Miss Piggy. It's enough to make you wish the campaign was still going on. Okay, maybe not.

I'm grateful that I will be out of the country with no internet access for the next two weeks, during which I suppose a whole new slew of unattractive people will be doing stupid things but I won't have to read about them.

LUCY BURDETTE: Glad I'm not Monica Lewinsky. Or for that matter, Hillary Clinton, even though she did an amazing job of bouncing back from her humiliation. Also Mrs. Petraeus, or Mrs. Spitzer, or most of all, Elizabeth Edwards. I get that people are drawn to do dumb things but being in a position of power and accolades seems to make it worse. I'm grateful to just be little old me:).
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RHYS BOWEN:  I've never understood what it is about power that attracts beautiful young women to unattractive old guys. It must be the same thing as the rest of the animal kingdom where the stag with the biggest antlers gets all the does. I'm amazed that women like Hillary stayed with their guy through all that farce, proving that power is a strong drug. I'd hate to be any of these women. All their lives, wherever they go, people will nudge each other, saying "Remember her?"

And as for making a good character? Only if she winds up dead. Certainly never a heroine. Readers can love a person who makes stupid mistakes, but not a shallow catty and needy one.

HALLIE EPHRON: Love the question, Jan --
THIS year, I am so grateful NOT to be:
- The Olympic badminton players who threw their matches to get an easier quarter-final draw
- Lance Armstrong
- Maria Shriver
- A Kardashian
- Related in any way to Honey Boo Boo
- The Pope's butler

And may I say I am a huge Elmo fan -- I am wishing Kevin Clash well and hope he can soon get back to the business of making us all giggle.

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Elmo? What? I've missed the loop on this one.  Must go Google, and hope to avoid any mention of Kardashians in the process.

Yes, love the question, Jan!

- I am grateful not to be Donald Trump's hair
- Grateful not to be shopping on Black Friday (taboo in our house)
- Grateful my daughter is too old to like Justin Bieber (and would have had better taste even when she was young enough)
- Grateful that this year I'm not going to be picking meat off the turkey carcass at 2 a.m. Thanksgiving night.  We're going out for Thanksgiving dinner!
- And I am really, really grateful that I have NO idea who Honey Boo Boo is.

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HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I am laughing and laughing. I tried to watch Honey Boo Boo (just out of journalistic curiosity of course) but couldn't.

I'm glad I'm not:

 --Ann Curry
 --The guy who wrote that scathing NYT review of Guy Fieri's new restaurant
 --Guy Fieri
 --Someone who cares about Guy Fieri
 --Karl Rove
 --Arnold Schwarzenegger's illegitimate son


But, oh, honeys, I have a book called THE OTHER WOMAN. For the past two years, I have been thinking about motivation and power and deception and denial, and why someone would be the other woman, and why a man in power would get entangled by someone like that. (And honestly, if I had put the real stuff from today's headlines in my book, people would have said it was too unbelievable, right?) So I am FASCINATED and also happy to be timely.

JAN:  So these are the people we are very grateful not to be this Thanksgiving.  How about you?
And please come back tomorrow when I talk about why gratitude is good for your brain!

Do Clothes Make the Character?

JAN BROGAN: Hilary Clinton's pantsuits, Rick Santorum's sweater vests, Jimmy Carter's cardigans,and Sarah Palin's glasses.

What do they have in common? According to Time Magazine, the are among modern history's 10 top Political Fashion statements.  As I read this, it made me think just how useful a single article of clothing can be. In one of the many Larry McMurtry's novels I have read, there is one I remember mostly because  the character always wore a T-shirt with a stupid saying on it.

I personally find clothing tricky in writing because I'm never sure where to squeeze it in. I also am not always sure what to include -- if you start out mentioning her blouse, for example, must you itemize the remainder of her clothing, the jeans and high heels, or otherwise sound like she's going about in JUST A BLOUSE. And if the outfit isn't unique enough, or saying something about the climate, should you even bother?

In terms of creating a memorable outfit - that is,  used repeatedly to mean something -- I believe I've only done it twice. In Final Copy, Addy McNeil carried a big, sloppy leather satchel that initially helped illustrate the chaos of her life,(everything was always falling out)  but later the recovery of her career, as she began to use it as a prop and to collect  evidence.

In Teaser, The two teenager girls in the suggestive video wore bikinis one in  a bright pink, the other in lime green.  The neon colors screamed youth and brashness, but their real use was as synecdoche. They became monikers for the teenagers before we knew their names. My protagonist, Hallie Ahern, would refer to them as "Lime Green" and "Pink" until she figured out their identities.


So my question Reds, is do clothes make the character? Have you ever created a truly memorable outfit for a charactes?  Clothing that served more than one purpose in the scene or story? Any tips you'd care to share?

HALLIE EPHRON: Clothing can speak volumes. In "Come and Find Me," my agoraphobic main character wears furry slippers and sweatpants with a stretched-out T-shirt that says HACKER on it. I don't need to explain that she's depressed.

When Diana realizes she has to leave the house and look for her missing sisters, the only way she gets up the courage to go is by dressing up like her avatar (skinny jeans and a great leather jacket and boots) -- her avatar's outfit is the embodiment of the courageous person she once was.

What else speaks volumes is what a character has in her purse. Diana's sister carries around a copy of Vogue Magazine and a quart-sized container of hand sanitizer.

RHYS BOWEN: Because I write historical novels the clothes my characters wear tie them firmly to their period. Sometimes it's the clothing they don't wear... Molly Murphy has always refused to wear a corset, thus setting herself apart form the conventional. But she finds the clothing of the period restrictive when she has to run away or follow a suspect.

Lady Georgie is conscious that she lacks the clothes to move among the smart set and clothing has been her downfall a couple of times when she has had to act as a model--the second time for Chanel. I describe the clothing and accessories her mother and other smart women wear to remind us of the 1930s. And of course Georgie's clothing is constantly being ruined by Queenie, her hopeless maid. So I suppose you can say that clothing plays a vital role in the embarrassment of my main character.

JAN:  I think one of my most favorite parts of historical research is looking up the clothes they wore. I have a fabulous book Nineteenth-Century Fashion in Detail by Lucy Johnston that is just beautiful to look at.

LUCY BURDETTE: Maybe because I'm not a fashionista, I find it difficult to make my characters' clothing really stand out. That said, Hayley Snow wears red high top sneakers as a matter of course, which her mother hates! In book two, Mrs. Snow comes to visit bearing gifts, including a pair of fancy sandals that cause blisters immediately. The clothing item I try to remember from book to book is the yellow silk shirt with palm trees on it that all the staff (all 3!) at Key Zest wear--their company uniform. It makes Hayley look a little sallow, but it proves she's made the team...


And I almost forgot--her new housemate, Miss Gloria, is famous for sweatsuits with sequined patterns on them--palm trees, the Conch Republic flag, a map of the Keys. I have a feeling I'm predicting my future wardrobe...

JAN: I'd say red high top sneakers sound pretty memorable.

DEBORAH CROMBIE:  I think I want Haley's wardrobe... If any writer decided to cast me as a fictional character these days, the description would say "writer working hard on a book and not bothering with anything else." Except, of course, for the book promo events.

I love clothes on characters.  Gemma never wears the standard female detective dark suit, although she sometimes envies her colleague, Melody, who does wear suits and manages to look fabulous in them.  Duncan does have to wears suits when he's officially on the job, and a friend in London gave me a hint as to where the CID blokes from Scotland Yard buy their suits, so I've been in and checked them out. (The suits, not the detectives.  Unfortunately, they weren't shopping that day.

And I love women's handbags and men's pockets.  You can tell so much about a character by what they carry and how they carry it.  In NO MARK UPON HER, Duncan has another detective list the contents of his wife's handbag to make the point.

ROSEMARY HARRIS: I have sometimes been taken to task for not providing enough info about what a character is wearing. Babe Chinnery (who is a former rock n roller and owns the diner where Paula hangs out) is a hottie of a certain age and I probably describe her outfits more than any other characters'. I sometimes describe the male and female "suburban uniforms" either when I want to make a point about how straight-laced someone is or how appearances can be deceiving.

My fave outfit from one of my books is one I want to own! In Slugfest, Paula is going to a blacktie event at a legendary flower show and she borrows and red dress, which she thinks is a little bare so she covers it with a Balenciaga jacket. Me want. I actually have her say "I guess as long as I'm wearing this dress I'll never be lonely."

Interestingly enough, someone has pointed out that I spend more time describing people's teeth!

HANK PHIL LIPPI RYAN: Ah, Jan, sometimes I just say one thing the person is wearing--a nine-year-old boy "his spindly arms flailing in a too-big red Sox t-shirt",  a guy in a bar wearing   "a fashionably wrinkled flannel shirt, fashionably untucked." Jane Ryland (a reporter in The Other Woman) always wears a black turtleneck and jeans.  But it is a minefield.  The other day I had to check with my college-student intern: "When you see a person wearing a baseball cap, bill in the back," I said, "Do you consider that on backwards or forward?"

JAN: Thanks, Hank, that helps actually, Anybody else have good advice on how to clothe our characters or have any insight into just how important or unimportant it might be?

Nominations please! Uppity women...

HALLIE EPHRON: TIME OUT for an update from yesterday: This is from Darlene Ryan, her "own little Matt Lauer because I don't think I'm going to meet the real one who is my not-so-secret crush." Is this adorable or what??

Moving on...

Vicki Leon is just out with a new book in her Uppity Women series. This one: "4000 Years of Uppity Women." It starts in ancient times, telling anecdotes about women who "rocked as many cradles as the other gals, but they've rocked a lot of boats as well."

Besides well known Cleopatra and Jezebel, she spotlights Korinna (Greece, 500 BC) who beat a man five times in a poetry competition; Margery Russell (England, 1300) who ran her late husband's import export business and stood up to Spanish pirates; and Queen Aahotep of ancient Egypt, so renowned for her battle skills she was buried with a ceremonial battle ax.

It's a feathery fun read, and it got me thinking about my favorite women, famous and not so famous, who excel in uppityness -- present company excluded, of course.

For sheer chutzpah and nerve, I'd nominate my dear friend Barbara for the way she fearlessly marches into stores and returns purchases. Did you know that at one time, Sears tools and GAP clothing could be returned at ANY point if they wore out?

I'd nominate my mother--when she started to write with my father (they co-authored plays and movies) she insisted that her name come first.

Looking at today's famous women, for sheer uppityness and boat rocking, here's ten whom I'd nominate for the Contemporary Uppity Women's Hall of Fame:

Hilary Clinton
Sarah Palin
Lady Gaga
Maya Lin
Kiki Smith
Patti Smith
Dr. Susan Love
Bette Midler
Cindy Sherman
Kara Walker (her art to the left)

Nominations, anyone? Famous and not...

JAN BROGAN: Well, you forgot Madonna - can there be a more uppity woman? And I always loved the idea that Golda Meir kicked butt against Arab countries that liked to keep their women subservient.

And more recently -- the Daughters of St. Paul, who said enough was enough and sued the Boston Diocese (which had to spend so much its money paying for the sins of all its pedophile priests) for control of their own retirement funds. The nuns reached a nice settlement. WAY TO GO NUNS!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Sue Grafton, for many reasons of course, including that she won't sell Kinsey Milhone to the movies. And Sara Paretsky. And how about Annette Bening? I dunno, she just seems kind of great to me. Got to have Rosa Parks. Tina Turner. Geraldine Ferraro. OH, definitely, Myra Kraft, who hung out with her husbands football team and showed them how to open their hearts.

ROSEMARY HARRIS: What a coincidence...I just got a copy of Uppity Women of Medieval Times. And right now (okay..not RIGHT now) I'm reading Catherine the Great by Robert Massie. Now THAT was an Uppity Woman. Fourteen years old, journeys to Russia, meets the idiot bridegroom, assesses the situation, bides her time, takes a few lovers and husband conveniently dies so she becomes Empress of all the Russias. Uppity.

More recently - and on a somewhat smaller scale - the first UW that leaps to mind is Kathryn Bigelow who won an Oscar for The Hurt Locker. That she beat her ex-husband for the honor must have been a nice little bonus.

LUCY BURDETTE: Gloria Steinem of course. Elinor Lipman (not only a wonderful novelist, but have you seen the poems she's writing on facebook?). Former Texas Governor Kay Richards. How about Sandra Day O'Connor, and Ruth Ginsberg and Sonya Sotomayer, and Elena Kagan--I think sitting on the Supreme Court (not to mention getting there) takes an enormous reserve of guts.

RHYS BOWEN: Did we leave out Hilary Clinton? Tina Fey? Margaret Thatcher? And one of the most assertive, but not uppity, was Mother Theresa. I saw a documentary in which she got everything she wanted in her calm, dignified manner, staring down men twice her size.

HALLIE: So, Jungle Red Readers, let's hear it -- your nominations to the Contemporary Uppity Women's Hall of Fame?

Bouchercon - Day 2

Rhys checked in with this report on Day 2 on the conference that devoured San Francisco...

RHYS: Bouchercon, day two. Highlights were definitely the Reacher's Creatures party, at which there were four, repeat FOUR Jack Reacher lookalikes and we had to vote on which one we thought was most like him. Let me tell you that all four were as tall as Lee (about six five) and very easy on the eye so it was hard to choose. I didn't see any of them kill or maim anybody so couldn't really judge--and the second highlight was supplying Dove bars in the hospitality suite. (you can tell from this what a shallow creature I really am.)

By the end of the day I had seen most people I wanted to see. I finally bumped into Tasha Alexander and new husband Andrew Grant, looking so sweetly happy together and I attended a fun panel chaired by Don Bruns, in which the panelists had to create a story from a headline read by the audience from today's newspaper. Let's just say that Hilary Clinton ended up in a mess of trouble according to their story..

I had to zoom across the Bay to sign books for Penguin at the Northern California booksellers convention. I looked up and sitting directly opposite me was Val McDermid. We waved to each other in between signing like crazy as the publisher gave away free books and booksellers had them signed. Came back to convention with tired hand.

Tomorrow is my panel at eight thirty a.m. Will try to be bright and witty very early. And tomorrow night is the disco ball. I'm not sure about that.

HALLIE: Rhys, Hank, we want pictures of you at the ball!

Becoming the First Lady

ROBERTA: I'm a big fan of Michelle Obama: I think she handled the campaign and the transition to the White House with grace and style. She gave up a big job to support Barack even though I'm certain she's smart enough to become the president herself. I totally love what she's doing on the White House grounds: starting a garden and talking about diet and health. (Although I didn't see tomatoes on the garden plan, and certainly not okra!) She wears what she wants (including no sleeves) and she looks good doing it. She's firm but loving with her kids, and a terrific role model for disadvantaged kids, and god knows she must have a good relationship with her own mother since they'll be living together for four years. And she's gained a lot of points with the public by supporting military families.

I'm pretty sure this question would be considered non-PC, but I'm going for it anyway. If you were going to serve as the first lady (first man if you're in Bill Clinton's shoes), what agenda would you push? What would be your strong points and your pitfalls?

JAN: I'd give some great parties. I'd really be into the nice clothes. Oh, and was there something else??? Oh right, public service. I'd like to deal with hunger and homelessness because in my mind, that's where you have to start. Oh, and I'd also be a real nag about the deficit.

HANK: It could be kind of fun. You could jab your husband with an elbow, and say--hey. Do we really need another one of those Trident missiles?

RHYS: My big problem would be having to be gracious to politicians, including foreign politicians whose agenda was repugnant to me. My agenda--although I feel passionately about health care reform I'd learn from what happened to Hilary Clinton. The First Lady is not an elected official. Her role is to lead by example. I think I'd try to be green, to encourage educational excellence and discourage waste. I'd like to step in and stop government pork, but I'd probably have to grit my teeth and shut up about that.

HALLIE: I'd be a lousy first lady. I'd be early Hilary and put my foot in my mouth about chocolate chip cookies. I'd probably have to be sent to charm school. And then I guess I'd devote myself to encouraging people to consume less and give more back, to make the common good everyone's priority. Wall Street would hate me.

ROBERTA: That would fun for us, Hallie! All the reporters could buzz Jungle Red Writers trying to find out about the real Hallie--and can't her husband put a lid on her? And we'd have to say, nope, what you see is what you get--and we love it that way!

HALLIE: Thanks, Roberta. I'd probably come out in favor of kind words. It's amazing how a few of those can turn around a day.

HANK: I'd be big on libraries. Early education. After-school programs. Self-esteem for pre-teens. And history. Somehow, when kids learn about the past, like a story--they care more about the present and the future. Plus, I could handle the press corps. Some of those questions in news conferences--puh-leeze. When the question is longer than the answer, you've got an ego problem. As First Lady, I could put a stop to all that.

ROBERTA: And if I was the First Lady, I'd definitely want you as my press secretary Hank!

RHYS: I hadn't thought about the clothes. It would be great to decide what "My look" would be and then have designers fighting to produce it for me, rather than cruising the sales and seeing what Ralph Lauren has at fifty percent off! Oh, and I'd love to choose the First dog!

RO: I'd probably just want to stay out of the way and let the guy they elected do his job, but I suppose that's not realistic. First ladies always take these risky stands - "I'm for children! Literacy!" Who's not?
I'd be the first lady who converted all the government cars to fatwagons... running on waste vegetable oil. Of course not having converted my own, I'd have to learn how to do it first. And they do tend to smell like onion rings..but that's okay.

Pile on, JR readers. What would your time in the White House be like? (Photo credits to Army.mil and sskennel)