327 people requested a free copy of “Brenda Corrigan Went Downtown” in the Goodreads Giveaway, from September 1 to 5.  Congratulations to winners Crystal Mitton of Hillsboro, In; Daniella Shimoonov of Brooklyn, NY; and Elisja Shumaker of  Pittsburgh, PA.

I’ve read umpteen articles about “The Pitch,” but when it comes to answering that five-word query—What is your book about?—my expertise on pitching vanishes. I stutter and stammer and gaze at the ceiling, while trying to compress the story of a captivating woman into a few scintillating sentences.

For I am a writer, after all, and not a pitchman.

I started out in advertising, but that was long ago, in the Mad Men era, and I turned to editing because that better suited my personality—not exactly shy and retiring, but tending to prefer solitary quiet pondering and paring, while leaving team efforts to the unruly.

As a magazine editor in a huge publishing company, I was classified as a “creative,” meaning I was paid less than execs who sold advertising. But I hobnobbed with the latter long enough to learn by osmosis how to pitch.

So why is that knowledge failing me now? Why does it not enter stage front when I am faced with those five little words (not facing, exactly—more aptly, evading), at book sales, when guests take me aside and ask what Brenda Corrigan Went Downtown is about:

315 pages, I joke, then get serious,
a woman coping with a catastrophic event,
the men she’s loved,
her experiences in a career that took her around the world,
her loyal friends and children

Now I’m cooking. Brenda Corrigan Went Downtown is about faith and the lack thereof, what kills faith, what restores faith. It proposes a dilemma: What would you do, dear reader, in similar circumstances?  It is about the joys of friendship and children and grandchildren, about love and failed love and failure to love, about loss and death.

“But is he really dead?” I am asked at book groups. “I wanted him to rescue her, marry her, carry her off on his muscular white steed to a land where they will live happily ever after.”

“That is a different book,” I suggest.

“A sequel!” someone shouts. A scattering of applause, big smiles.

“Perhaps,” I grant. “Perhaps I will call it, Brenda Corrigan Came Home.”

Perhaps that will be easier to pitch.

This is one of my favorite passages from Brenda Corrigan Went Downtown — A dream of 9/11 in Washington, DC:

Awash in the news, her former neighbors would converge on the lawn in front of their building, consultants wandering off to Café Deluxe to nurse a cappuccino; retired foreign service officers entrenched, waiting for official word of what to do next. The Romanov heir would twist his rings and murmur memories of his Paris boyhood. The General from the Shah’s army would pierce the air with his foul cigarettes, his wife silent at his side. Nannies would comfort toddlers alarmed by the sudden roar of an F16 . . .

Available for sale at Amazon.com or Ask Your Local Bookstore

Graphic designer Ana Eastep and I created many projects together when I was a McGraw-Hill editor and in my editorial services business. So it was natural to reach out to her when I needed a unique, beautiful cover for my book. I mentioned cubism and yellow roses as possible motifs. Ana read my manuscript, absorbed its essence and my comments, and this exquisite illustration is the result of her creative genius. I am eternally grateful.

February 3, 2013

Brenda Corrigan is four years old today. She was born on Super Bowl Sunday 2009. To celebrate, I stopped obsessing about every vowel, consonant and comma and nitpicking every noun, verb and adjective and uploaded my manuscript to Amazon CreateSpace, and before long, I will have a book! That I hope to share with you, dear potential reader.

So stay tuned for more about Brenda Corrigan Went Downtown.

What a glorious journey this has been.

This is an excerpt from Brenda Corrigan Went Downtown:

As a child, I visited slaughterhouses. They lined a street so wide it could have been a boulevard. The asphalt shone with bloody puddles of sunlight. Trucks and cars backed into the curb for easy loading. Drivers loped determinedly in and out of doors, arms full, faces closed.

I always waited in my father’s car. He dealt lunches to factory workers from the deck of his station wagon, then we’d go to market to buy next day’s supplies. Sometimes I’d bring a book to read, so as not to see the blood. Sometimes I’d close my eyes, lean back against the seat, and dream. That the animals sang, that they played and danced in a happy zoo and these men who paced in blood were, like me, merely visitors.

But I always knew that the animals longed to be free. Their singing wounded my heart and I wished that they would one day trample the bloody aprons and dash onto the wide, free street. Oh what a fairy tale this would make!

Of course, they never strayed. They huddled in grand choirs, scraping the senses of all who still heard.

I learned to chant: “Chop! the chicken head. Ping! the pig is dead.”

That’s this pretty girl, second from right, at 17.

A pretty girl grows accustomed to being the center of attention. She is on the A-list, selected for teams and sleepovers, to star in school plays, and to go to ritzy beach houses on summer weekends and on ski trips in winter.

A pretty girl grows accustomed to being sought after by A-list boys, and longed for by boys on society’s fringe. If charm accompanies that pretty face, she often is teacher’s pet, with latitude granted for missed homework and poor quiz scores.

When I was in school in the 50s, a pretty girl believed it wise to compete with girls for boys, and not to compete with boys. Collecting varsity pins of stars who vied for her attention trumped any desire she may have had to pursue academic excellence.

A pretty girl who attended college in the early 60s, often on a quest for an M.R.S. degree, received high grades for work that might be mediocre, from professors (they were mostly men then) who primped as she entered the room, hoping to gain her admiration. Accustomed to “getting by on her looks,” a pretty girl sometimes felt bewildered by changing expectations of the era, but found that a pretty face serves as hard currency in any world.

A pretty girl is accustomed to being noticed as she enters a room. The waters part for her. She is fawned over by plain girls wanting to share the glow of her aura, and men are courtly. In the office or lab, she is offered raises and promotions (to a point), foreign travel and prime assignments. In marriage, her failings are happily forgiven by her besotted husband.

Woe to this pretty girl as she ages. We all know her story. Often her position at home or at work is usurped by a younger woman. She doesn’t quite get why her status has changed, because disappointment is a strange bedfellow. And when she looks in the mirror, she still sees a pretty face. She feels pretty. Her Gestalt is “pretty.”

Over time, this self-image wanes. The faces of her friends become lined and she may muse, “Is that how I look?” Then, one morning the face that greets her in her mirror is not the pretty girl.

I was a lucky pretty girl, in that I had it both ways. I never fully incorporated a pretty-girl persona because by the time my swan emerged, in late adolescence, I was used to being ignored by boys and had developed other interests.

My mom is on the left, Aunt Clara on the right.

But in the end, I am that woman looking in the mirror wondering where the pretty girl went. Because my pretty mother died young, I no longer see her face in mine. I see my Aunt Clara, who lived a long life.

I am sharing these thoughts because my friend wondered if the novel I’m writing addresses metaphorically my preoccupation with aging and the loss of physical beauty. My protagonist, Brenda Corrigan, is attacked and undergoes facial reconstruction. As she tries to cope with the reality that her pretty, though aging, face has been usurped by one misshapen and scarred, she is determined to rely on other strengths, noting that the blind hear everything, the deaf see all. Wit remains her mainstay: When a group of women enter a posh Beverly Hills restaurant, Brenda observes their plastic surgery results. “Were those faces all cut from the same stencil?” she asks her daughter. “They all look like gaping fish.”

Aging indeed is a theme of this novel. We all confront the loss of physical beauty and learn to rely on other strengths, if we are lucky.