Alex George Books » Family

Holiday Cheer

Alex George — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 15:44:59 +0000

Something of a pot-pourri today.

Good news continues to roll in about the book. We are now hearing about media coverage in newspapers and magazines, and it is all very exciting. I will post nearer the time when and where things will be appearing.

In the meantime, I have to share this wonderful review of A GOOD AMERICAN by Michael Magras. It was a wonderfully thoughtful (and generous) write-up. Michael and I have been corresponding on twitter for some time, usually about either writing or jazz, and so it should come as no surprise that the focus of his reading was on the musical elements in the novel. I have Michael’s new novel on my kindle and am looking forward to reading it over Christmas.

Speaking of which, the festive spirit has finally arrived in our house. We had a late start and were starting from scratch in terms of decorations but the children and I have been hard at work with the glitter glue and stickers and now we have a nattily-dressed tree that we are quietly proud of.

The children are staying with me pretty much all the time until Christmas Day. It will be beyond strange, and I fear beyond awful, not to spend Christmas itself with them, but such is life. This year they will get two visits from Santa, and right now we are all focusing on those kind of silver linings, such as they are.

Once I have dropped the kids off, I will be turning the car east and driving down I-70 to St. Louis. Since I won’t be seeing the children again until after the New Year, I’ll be flying back to England on Christmas Day itself, arriving home on what we call Boxing Day. Being on the other side of the ocean from my children will be hard, but it will be wonderful to see the rest of my family (including the northern California contingent.) While I am in England I will be reading (a lot), catching up on a backlog of blog posts that I owe various people, doing a variety of interviews and PR-related stuff, meeting my agent and seeing old friends in London, and (I hope) catching my breath before the madness of publication begins in earnest next year.

On the subject of catching one’s breath, I am joyfully rediscovering the therapeutic benefits of having a dog. There is a park near our house where dogs are allowed to run off-leash and the four of us have been there three times in the last two days. Theo runs with the other dogs, while my pet-crazy children pet any four-legged creature they can get near. The weather has been unseasonably warm for the past couple of days, and we have loved just being outside in the fresh air, watching our puppy have the time of his life. It’s astonishing how witnessing such unbounded joy can rub off on you and wipe away more quotidian worries.

The other wonderful thing about all this is the aftermath. Tired children + tired dog = relative peace and deep, deep contentment.

DIY Book Trailer

Alex George — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 13:02:32 +0000

Last weekend the kids and I discovered a new website, xtranormal, which is a brilliant place where anyone can make movies simply by typing in dialogue and having characters speak it. I have seen several extremely funny videos made this way, including this one about writing a novel which I posted a while ago. Author Laura Zigman has made a whole series of extremely funny films, which I recommend highly. Here’s a good place to start.

The kids enjoyed playing about with the site. My son likes making complicated stop-motion movies with his ipod touch – he can spend hours in his bedroom animating soft toys and other things and making them do strange things. I guess that’s better than watching another re-run of iCarly, right? Here’s an example.

Anyway, I could see my son’s eyes grow bigger as he played about with xtranormal as the possibilities blossomed and multiplied in his head. I went off to take a shower, and by the time I came downstairs again, he and his sister had come up with this. All their own work – they come up with the concept, the script, the execution – the lot.

I don’t know if there will be an official book trailer for my novel – nobody has said anything to me about it – but that question has been rendered somewhat moot. Because how, really, can you do better than this?!?

I love my kids.

Friends in Funny Places

Alex George — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 16:51:02 +0000

My name is Alex, and I am a lawyer.

I began my first legal job in a large firm in London almost exactly nineteen years ago, and I’ve practiced law in England, France, and the United States. It’s not something that I talk about much on this blog, because (a) this is a blog about writing, mainly, (b) I want you all to like me and (c) being a lawyer is not good blog material, frankly. But something happened yesterday in my so-called “professional” world that I wanted to share.

What happened was, at about four o’clock, there was a knock on my office door, and these were delivered:

Freshly-baked, hand-made, chocolate chip cookies, still hot from the oven. They were delivered with a little bottle of milk on the side.

Talk about something making your day.

I had met with a client earlier that afternoon. I am very fond of this particular client. We had spent some time looking at various ways of addressing a problem she had, trying to work out the best way of resolving the issue. After much discussion, I finally got to to the bottom of it, gave her what she needed to move things forward, and that was the business side of matters concluded. Then my client, who knows a little bit about some of the knottier things going on in my personal life, asked me how I was.

I wasn’t, I have to confess, prepared for the question. Caught a little off-guard, I’m afraid my usual veneer of professional rectitude slipped somewhat and I opened up more than perhaps I should have. The client listened, wonderfully sympathetically, and offered some warm words of comfort. I was very grateful – it is, after all, my job to provide counsel to the client, not the other way around.

You might imagine my astonishment when, after all that, the cookies arrived a couple of hours later. I was incredibly touched. It was a wonderfully generous act, beautiful in its simplicity and sincerity. The cookies came with a note: “You find friends in funny places.”

I didn’t finish the cookies, by the way. There are some left, and even though they’re no longer warm, they’re still delicious, all the more so for having come from such a rich act of kindness. Even though much of the world appears to be going to hell right now, there are still good, kind people out there. Thank heavens.

What Matters

Alex George — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 15:59:26 +0000

Yesterday I returned to Missouri after a wonderful week with my children in San Francisco, where we stayed with my sister and her lovely family.

Living in mid-Missouri, going to San Francisco is, understandably, always a bit of an event. Weeks ahead of time, we raid the library for travel guides and plan what to do. This trip we went to the wonderful California Academy of Sciences, did an open-topped bus ride through the city and over the Golden Gate Bridge, and ate dim sum in Chinatown. We also went down to San Jose (I drove; no prizes for guessing what I was whistling the whole way) to see an old-fashioned circus, with clowns, dare-devil motorcycle stunts, and acrobats. More prosaically, I took my son to see the last Harry Potter film while my daughter went with her beloved older cousins to get her nails done. We had a grand old time of it, and none of us wanted the trip to end.

Yesterday afternoon, on the drive back from Kansas City airport to Columbia, I asked the children what their favorite part of the vacation was. My daughter, at six, resists the concept of “favorite”. She likes to be allowed several options. I have explained that this rather defeats the whole concept, but she remains resolutely unimpressed (no doubt rightly) by my attempts to instill intellectual rigor into our discussions. I think her multi-colored (and already chipped) fingernails were a highlight, as was the gift of a battered old bunny from one of her cousins. My son enjoyed the tour bus and exploring Fisherman’s Wharf. They both liked the hour’s trampolining that we did one morning, even if everyone was extremely sore afterwards.

But what was most heartening was that their responses did not center around where we had gone, or what we had done. What mattered to my children was that we had done things with my sister’s family. The children have five cousins; three live in California, two live in England. We don’t see each other as often as any of us would like, but when we do get together, it’s an immense lovefest which is far more rewarding (for parents and children) than any amount of worthy cultural excursions or entertaining trips. And this makes me very, very happy.

Personally, my favorite memory of the trip was probably the most mundane one of all. It was on the first day, after we had left the California Academy of Sciences. We’d been in the museum for more than four hours and had walked through Golden Gate Park planning to hop back on to the streetcar that had taken us there. The kids and I all had a bit of museum fatigue, and as we passed a delightful-looking cafe I suggested we stopped for a rest and a little refreshment.

We sat at a table on the sidewalk. It was 30 degrees cooler than it had been in Missouri and utterly blissful. While I gulped down much-needed coffee and my daughter merrily spilled her chocolate milkshake over herself, we sat back and watched the most astonishing parade of dogs go by. I have never seen so many dogs in a city. My children were in heaven – they adore hounds of all shapes and sizes. And so we sat, and drank our drinks, and enjoyed the sunshine, and cooed at the passing canine population. I could have stayed there all day.

This was our first trip as a newly-minted, reconstituted family of three. And that moment – just the three of us, happy, tired, and really doing not that much - was about perfect.

Who needs museums and bridges and all that stuff, when you have family?

Charades

Alex George — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 13:24:23 +0000

Since I’ve been looking after the children on my own in the new place we have instigated a new bedtime tradition: charades. (Pronounced CHARARDS or CHARAIDS depending on your inclination/country of origin.)

It’s a lot of fun, although we discovered pretty quickly that we have a limited repertoire of mutual books/films/songs/etc to draw from. I am thankfully unfamiliar with the stuff they like to watch on TV, and they are uninterested in my books and music collection (although my son did once try “A Visit From the Goon Squad” because he liked the title. Perhaps unsurprisingly, neither me nor my 6 year-old daughter got it.)

Ever the pragmatist, my daughter decided to improvise and invent a brand-new category, knotty in both in its vastness and its vagueness: things.

You’ll see in the video that in between my giggles I am imploring my daughter to stop talking. (This is not the only time this has been known to happen.) I am actually rather delighted by her disregard for the rules… although those are doubtless words that will one day come back to haunt me. And before you ask, no, I have no clue what it is was she was trying to describe.

I wish I were six again.

Long Journeys

Alex George — Fri, 06 May 2011 12:22:44 +0000

“Frederick loved America. He loved its big open spaces, the sunsets that drenched the evening sky in blistering color. Above all, he loved the smell of promise that hung in the air. Europe, he could see now, was slowly suffocating under the weight of its own history. In America the future was the only thing that mattered. Frederick turned his back on everything that had gone before, and looked ahead into the bright lights of the young century. Here, a man could reinvent himself.”

In 2003 I left England and moved with my family to America. It seemed to many to be a radical move, but I was just following in the family tradition.

My mother was born and raised in New Zealand. In her early twenties she took a boat to England, met my father, and decided to stay. A few generations earlier, her great-grandparents had made the trip in the opposite direction, eloping from their English families who disapproved of their union, and hoping for freedom in the wilderness of the southern hemisphere.

Before beginning A GOOD AMERICAN, I had begun, and abandoned, a couple of other ill-fated novels. Some of the most common advice given to aspiring writers is Write What You Know. It’s a fine theory, but probably only if you have something worth knowing. As I was pondering this, it occurred to me that the experience of packing up my life and moving to a new country, with no expectation that I would ever return home again, might just qualify.

Finally, I had my story.

In some ways, my experience of moving to America in 2003 could not have been much more different to my ancestors’ journey to New Zealand in 1864. But certain essential elements had probably not changed much: the hope for a better life, the fear of the unknown, and the paradox of wanting to adapt to your new country without forgetting where you came from. (My mother has lived in England for more than fifty years now, but she still calls New Zealand home.)

One of the appeals of the immigrant tale is its ubiquity. Almost every family living in the United States today has a story similar to the one I have told somewhere in its past. Whether ten years ago or three hundred years ago, whether with due process or by way of a midnight ghosting across an unmanned border, whether by slave boat or luxury airplane, we all came here from somewhere.

Leavin’ On a Jet Plane. Maybe.

Alex George — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 03:36:16 +0000

Let me see… it’s Tuesday, so I should be in London today, having lunch with my agent, Bruce. Except that I’m still here in Missouri, reading weather reports about unprecedented levels of snowfall that has put England into chaos. Flights have been grounded across Europe, roads have been blocked, trains halted. It’s all a terrible mess. Our flight has been cancelled twice so far.

Please, don't let it be me

I usually derive a certain satisfaction from telling my English friends how much more weather we get over here. And yes, I will admit that on occasion this does descend into out-and-out bragging – you know, the summers are hotter, the winters colder, the rain heavier, the tornados – well, we have tornados. (Which, lest we forget, was something my wife had somehow forgotten to mention before we moved over here.) One of the things I enjoyed about Missouri when I first got here was that there are actually four seasons, as opposed to the traditional English two (wet and cold; wet and slightly less cold.) Now, though, Britain seems to be savaged with weather as extreme as ours. I can remember snow falling just a handful of times during my childhood; in the past three years they’ve had more snow there than here. And people still like to pretend that climate change is a myth.

Of course, the problem is that England isn’t equipped for serious winter weather (which has prompted an outcry and much political hand-wringing.) Snowfall like this wouldn’t have merited a mention in certain parts of the United States, and business would have carried on without a hitch. But the Brits, bless their summer-light cotton socks, still aren’t used to it, and consequently the entire country’s infrastructure has ground to a halt. Which leaves us stranded here, rather than spending some time with my family. My children haven’t seen their grandparents for ten months; every day is precious. Sometimes it’s difficult not to be a little bitter.

Still, every snow cloud has a silver lining – on this occasion, two. Firstly, it looks as if we’ll get out tomorrow. And secondly, we have spent the last three days here, warm and safe (if bored) at home. We could have been stranded in some monstrous airport somewhere. Take your blessings where you find them, I say. Merry Christmas, everyone.

What Are You Thankful For?

Alex George — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 12:35:59 +0000

[This is an older post that seemed appropriate to revisit today. I finished my six-month rewrite of the manuscript yesterday and sent it back to my publisher in New York. I think (and hope) that it is a much better book than it was six months ago. I am certainly thankful for that. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.]

Hallam made a card for us yesterday. This is what it said, creative spelling and all:

“I am thankful for:

Mom and Dad, school, home, your job, life!, Fred and Squirrel, Mendy and Michelle [his teachers!], Grandma and Grandpa, my friends, your cooking, books, clothes, your love, your persinality, fun, food, caring.”

It’s a pretty fabulous list. I especially like the exclamation mark after life!

But something, or someone, is missing. My parents are not on it.

It’s not Hallam’s fault, of course. We live in America; they live in England. He only sees them once or twice a year. I know he loves them as much as his Grandma and Grandpa. But his innocent omission made me sad. I’ve written in this blog about different US/UK perspectives about things, but that’s all just fluff. When you choose to move your life half the way across the world, this is what matters.

When I told my parents that we were going to move to America, they were (or appeared to be) pretty stoical about it. After all, they knew the territory: my mother moved to England from New Zealand to marry my father. I told them that on aggregate they would end up spending more time with us, as visits would be for weeks, not afternoons. It turns out that I was right about this, but as my mother says, it’s not the same. And she’s right. We can’t visit on a whim, just for an afternoon. We go for months, and months, and months, without seeing each other. They are not getting the chance to watch their grandchildren grow up, the way grandparents should.

Now, we have it lucky compared to what they went through a generation earlier. When my mother traveled to England, she came on a boat. (Sorry, Mum.) People wrote letters that took weeks to arrive. A three minute telephone call cost a week’s salary. We’re very fortunate that we can afford to fly across the Atlantic every year. I only spent time with my grandparents twice that I can remember, when I was five and seven. I did not know them, except through my mother’s stories (which were many, thankfully.)

In contrast, I speak with my Mum and Dad at length every week. We email; we do facebook and can post photos instantly; sometimes we do iChat and send videos. (Sometimes they even read this blog.) So we keep in touch, better than we ever could have before. And I’m thankful for that.

But it’s not the same.

Snip, Snip

Alex George — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 20:02:59 +0000

No, this is not a post about books, or writing.

This is a post (actually an edited re-post) about something entirely different. And personal.

Ahem. You may want to look away now. So, fair warning having been issued…

… the nurse was awfully nice. She asked me what I did, how long had I been in the States for, did I like Missouri, all the usual stuff. I lay back and did my best to answer naturally, but it was a little difficult to concentrate, because further down the bed my testicles were on public display, sitting primly on a carefully positioned towel and apparently unconnected to the rest of me. I tried not to think about them, and instead gazed anxiously at my left wrist. A small funnel had been inserted into my vein into which the anesthetic would go. The nurse told me it was like drinking four margaritas in quick succession. I have never drunk four margaritas in quick succession (I don’t think) but I was worried that it wouldn’t be enough, given what was going to happen next.

It was V-day.

I love my children. They are my life. We have a boy and a girl; la choix du roi, as the French say. They are both utterly beautiful and funny and kind. And, praise be, healthy. Every day my wife and I look at them and pinch ourselves and wonder what we’ve done to be so lucky. But we didn’t want any more, either. Best to quit while you’re ahead, and all that. Why roll those dice again? Besides, we had no wish to go back to diapers and sleepless nights.

But when Christina suggested that I get a vasectomy I found myself resisting the idea. It was the permanence of the solution that bothered me. I would be calling it quits, and even though I didn’t want any more children, the prospect made me deeply sad. Perhaps I was struggling against some atavistic male urge to procreate, reluctant to sign off on my contribution to the human gene pool. But I think it was actually simpler than that: being a father has been the most rewarding and wonderful thing ever to have happened to me. Rationally I knew it made sense; emotionally I just didn’t want to close off the possibility of ever doing it again.

I stalled for as long as I could. Christina waited patiently for me to work it all out, and in the end I relented. Discreet enquiries were made, an appointment scheduled. There was some delay before they could fit me in. Vasectomies were terribly in that season.

On my way to the hospital, I stopped in at a shop that sold cycling equipment. I had been warned that I would need some tight cycling shorts after the operation to keep everything neatly tucked up and out of harm’s way – without them I would be (I was assured by friends who had already gone through all this) howling with pain. I prowled the racks of spandex, wondering what on earth I was looking for. Finally a shop assistant approached me and asked whether I was looking for something in particular. I cocked what I hoped looked like an amused eyebrow and explained that I was having a “procedure” later that day and that I would need to wear something tight. He nodded at once, completely unsurprised. (I guess I didn’t look much like a serious cyclist.) Apparently they sell loads of the things every week to men like me.

I then spent a surreal few minutes popping in and out of the changing room, trying on different sizes of shorts. A new problem had presented itself: exactly how tight was tight enough? In the end I went for the tightest I could squeeze into – two pairs, actually – and drove on to the hospital with my kinky spandex pants. (Now there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write.)

So, back to the Operating Room. The doctor was late. My conversation with the nurse was meandering along nicely. Finally the phone rang. The doctor was on his way. The nurse plunged the syringe and the anesthetic slipped into my bloodstream, and a few moments later the doctor arrived in the room. He wished me a good afternoon. That’s about the last thing I remember. I don’t know where that nurse goes for her margaritas, but it sounds like my kind of place.

Some time later I woke up in a wheelchair, as high as a kite. There were so many drugs whizzing around inside me that I couldn’t feel a thing. Christina drove me home and I spent the rest of the afternoon zonked out in bed. I moved about very gingerly for the next few days, chugging painkillers and grateful for my spandex pants, which I wore 24/7. (I knew better than to complain too much about the discomfort. When it came to the whole baby thing, I knew which of us had suffered more.)

For a while there was a vague sense of regret about all the children I wasn’t going to have any more, but it didn’t last long. Time heals most things. After all, it’s not as if having two children to adore isn’t enough. And it helps that they are who they are:

Thin End of the Labrador

Alex George — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 12:44:48 +0000

We always had pets growing up.

My childhood can be divided up into a succession of eras defined by the canine presence in my parents’ home. First there was Sam, who was around before I was. Then came Benji. Then Sophy, and now Purdy. All labradors. All wonderful, affectionate, loyal and fabulous creatures.

My wife, on the other hand, never had a pet. Well, that’s not quite true. Her parents gave her a stone dog once. And she did have a cow called Paddington – until, that is, Paddington appeared one evening at dinner, and not as a guest, if you catch my drift. (You’ve heard of urban myths. This is a rural myth. Except it’s true.)

Anyway – that whole wonderful, affectionate, loyal and fabulous thing? My wife doesn’t buy it. She thinks dogs are smelly, bothersome, hair-shedding nuisances that need to be walked in the rain.

But above all smelly.

This is why, after twelve and a half years of marriage, we have never had a dog, even though we live in the middle of the countryside.

However, for the past month or so, we have – to my astonishment, I will readily admit – had a pet in the home. (We had fish before, but they don’t count. Oh, and a hermit crab painted like Old Glory, but that didn’t count, either.) Here he is:

He is a rather sweet guinea pig.

There was, naturally, a debate about what to call him. I wanted to call him Jonathan Franzen, because I am hugely pretentious and also, you know, just so plugged-in to the literary world. In the end the children settled on Papa – which is suitably literary in its way, I suppose, although I’ve never been much of a Hemingway fan. (I know. Sacrilege, etc.) Of course, the pig’s name had nothing to do with him. Papa is actually short for his full name, which is Papa New Guinea Pig. (This is the sort of geeky geography joke you get when you send your children to Montessori school.) Rather weirdly, Papa is also what the children call my father. Oh, imagine the fun we’ll have next time my parents come to stay.

“I’m just going to rub Papa’s tummy!”

“We need to put Papa back in his cage!”

“Papa’s pooped in the corner again!”

And so on. I can hardly wait. Neither, I’m sure, can he. (The grandfather, not the guinea pig.)

Anyway, Papa is here to stay, and we love him. Some, it is fair to say, love him more than others. Hallam loves him more than anyone. Papa has given our son a whole bunch of new things to worry about – something that he probably didn’t need. New vistas of worry are opening up before him every day. These were originally medical – concerns that Papa was not eating/drinking enough, had something caught in his throat, was about to suffer a heart attack, etc. Recently the emphasis has shifted to more philosophical ground – does Papa love him enough, etc. It’s difficult to know what to tell him – Papa is, after all, just a guinea pig who squeaks a lot. We spend a lot of time wondering if they are happy squeaks or sad squeaks.

Anyway, he is a welcome addition to the George household. Christina seems genuinely fond of him. I’m watching it all with interest. I still want a dog. Papa is the advance guard, sent in to soften that hard heart so that she will soon adore all that is warm and furry (and smelly.) Well, I can hope.