No Hypocrites

On my second cup of coffee, I am still trying to face the day, slicing open a new box of books to sell at the last day of this weekend Arts and Crafts.  It is 7 am, the sun is rising and the phone in my office starts ringing.

True to her word, Susan Jane Gillman is telephoning from Geneva, Switzerland where the sun is setting on the dawning cocktail hour.  She has called to tell me how much she likes Suitcase Filled with Nails.  We talk for an hour.  She talks like the words she writes in her best selling books…honestly, no-holds barred, ballsy, politically aware and politically incorrect if she wants to make a point, or mock a point. 

The point, and I must be so in-your-face about this again, is she likes my book.  It is I who should be bowing before the master (mistress).  She is the author of New York Times best sellers not me… Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress,  Kiss My Tiara: How to Rule the World as a SmartMouth Goddes, and Undress me in the Temple of Heaven.

My first summer home (2005) after teaching in Kuwait, I serendipitously selected Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress, from the shelves of our town’s highly revered Carnegie Library.  I’d never heard of Susan Jane Gilman before and judged the book by its cover – a pouting girl in a pouffy white dress.  Check it out of your own library or buy it…for the full story.

One passage from Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress wedged within my withering brain matter (I’ll toast to that).  I would remember it again and again as the going got rough, those six years in Kuwait where I learned to duck and cover, stave off  back stabs and deliberate frontal attacks in an office warfare I wanted no part of.  Susan sums it up better.

     Had I been more experienced in office warfare, I might have strategized cunning ways to defend myself and retaliate.

     A horrendous job is like a chronic illness, a rotting tooth. It infects everything in your life: your world constricts and collapses into the toxic, throbbing ache of it. You can’t go into a café, walk your dog, or go away for a weekend without a constant, low-grade sense of dread.    (excerpted from  Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress and included, HONEST TO  god with PERMISSION  in Suitcase Filled with Nails).

I’ve sipped my second cup of coffee dry while talking to Susan.  Coyotes cry in the background as the moon sinks and the sun slinks higher, mustering enough sweat to warm away a Pacific Northwest cloud cover.   Susan says Suitcase Filled with Nails reminded her of experiences she wrote about in Undress me in the Temple of Heaven.  “Had I read it?”

Of course.  After I had written Suitcase Filled with Nails.

By the time we hang up the sun has set in Switzerland and it is sunny in Seattle.  Among other dichotomies and similarities we shared we identified with what it was like to be in a country where you had no rights and were subject to the whims of a not so whimsical government.  We are not alone in our observations and lived experiences.