Cindy's blog

As I write this, we are experiencing the first full-fledged summer weather of the season—highs in the mid-90s, a light south wind, and a cloudless, expansive sky.   This is the summer I love.  Don’t talk to me in July when it’s too hot to be outside at 10 p.m., and you have to put booties on your dog when you take her out for a walk, so she won’t burn her paws crossing the street.  No, today is the perfect summer day—made for lazing poolside (friends with pools, call me!) with a great novel.   

This article first appeared in The July, 2013 edition of The Tulsa Book Review.

*This article is adapted from Laura’s One Small Good Thing blog, a project this past spring in which she asked librarians to notice “one small good thing” per day for a month.

This is going to sound unnecessarily dark, but once, years ago, my therapist asked if I was having suicidal thoughts. "No," I answered. Then, "Well, yes, sort of? Like, I think about how great it would be not to be myself anymore. Not to be dead, exactly, but to wake up and just be some different person."

I’m still holding fast to my decision to no longer use the term “Women’s Fiction” when describing a particular style of writing that typically focuses on relationships among spouses, partners, friends, and/or family members.  It’s a reductive and somewhat condescending descriptor that pigeon holes certain writers.  Meg Wolitzer elaborated eloquently about this very topic in the New York Times Book

It has become commonplace recently to compare certain television dramas to great literature – and with such brooding, character-driven and thematically rich shows as Breaking Bad, The Americans, and Mad Men, I get it.