Privilege, big breasts and love songs

Last week I spent an uncomfortable few moments listening to ex-PM Silvio Berlusconi orchestrating his own defence in a Milanese court. Berlusconi is being charged with paying for sex with a minor, Karima el-Mahroug, known as Ruby Rubacuore (Ruby the Heart Stealer). Seventeen at the time, curvy and pumped-up, Ruby was apparently present at one of the PM’s many gatherings at his sumptuous villa at Arcore, outside Milan. Looking tired but tweaked, the gaffe-prone 76-year-old sounded as though he were talking about a family picnic, mentioning Neapolitan love songs and visits by his children.

For the past two years, as the country has been hurtling towards economic meltdown, Italians have been hearing about what the ex-PM’s ‘bunga bunga’ parties may have entailed. We have been told that the ‘bunga bunga’ is everything from a sex position to a post-dinner erotic dance by women procured by sleazy ‘talent scout’ Lele Mora (fresh out of gaol for fraud). Selection by the Prime Minister during the ‘bunga bunga’ dance entitled women to everything from sex with the septuagenarian to gifts and money, for which the Amazonian women queued and probably bitched with one another. One can only imagine the conversations.

In the unreliable words of Ruby the Heart Stealer, (who also denies she had intimate relations with the ageing politician,) the ‘bunga bunga’ concept was a formula copied from Silvio’s ex-best mate Muammar Kaddafi and simply involved being surrounded by twenty naked women. Harem-style. It has been said that Silvio added his own twist with the women-on-women also dressing as nuns or police officers.

Berlusconi and his cronies have long complained that the press has no right to violate the private life of an individual and here they have a point. However, given that Veronica Lario, Berlusconi’s now ex-wife, chose to write a public letter of protest printed in a major Italian newspaper following a scandal from a few years back (lamenting the lack of respect the flirtatious PM gave to his wife and offspring), the country could be justified in seeking to understand what is going on. Never mind the abuse of power and conflict of interests on a political level.

For Berlusconi has also been accused of tampering with the law by calling up the Milan central police office when the unreliable Ruby was arrested on an unrelated theft charge. The media billionaire told police that Karim el-Mahroug was grand-daughter of Egyptian ex-President Hosni Mubarak, and that her detention would cause a diplomatic scandal. He sent Nicole Minetti, a booby-dental-hygienist-turned-local-politician and now under investigation for ‘procuring young women’, to collect the naughty teen. Currently, Berlusca’s angle is that the shifty telephone call was purely ‘seeking information’ and, nagged by the national press he constantly claims is stridently left wing and in league against him, he has continuously claimed that he is a ‘generous’ man who in voluptuous Ruby saw an underprivileged girl in trouble (the girl’s own father has said she is a fame-seeking scallywag).

Berlusconi also admitted giving nearly 80.000 euros to the young woman to open a beauty salon. (Plus 5.000 euros for the night in question.)

Interestingly, Berlusconi’s tentacles have reached out to include George Clooney, who the unreliable Ruby claims she saw with ex-girlfriend Elisabetta Canalis at one of the ‘bunga bunga’ events. Clooney denies he was ever present, but recalls that an evening spent at the ex-PM’s Rome residence was ‘one of the more astonishing evenings of my life’.

Explain ‘astonishing’ please George.

* * *

N.B. Some of us were happily astonished to hear that Berlusconi was charged with tax evasion last week, but already the three year sentence has been reduced to one year, and he will be able to launch two appeals - so as with most of his trials, the statute limitations may expire. Despite his loud cries of injustice, the ex-PM is slowly sinking in national esteem. Era ora!

P.S. I have a great interview up on the lovely (creative, accomplished and funny) Kimberly Sullivan's blog kimberlysullivan.wordpress. Kimberly and I met at the Matera Women's Fiction Festival and I plan on gatecrashing her writing group in Rome next month!

Having My Cake.

Yesterday I baked a cake. I also ate a slice of it. A small one as you see.

How many of us have our cakes and may nibble on them?

Years ago I was a young married wife with a nappy-changing habit. I mean, I was always at it. I dragged my baby around with us everywhere. My husband’s colleagues were often single women busy with their careers, as modern liberated women are. They grimaced at me trotting off to the bathroom with a screaming toddler. Went Ewww when I plonked dirty nappies into their gleaming waste bins. It was clear I was doing something they didn’t wish for, for goodness' sakes.

Much has been made of the divide between career women and stay-at-home mums. I belong to the stay-at-home or partially-working team, and yet I've always had grand admiration for (and many friendships with) women who choose to leave their biology aside and make something other than motherhood the centre of their lives. Do we all have to reproduce? I don't think we do. I know that having kids made me into a better person - less rigid, more real, less self-absorbed. I realised I was no longer at the centre of a world I could not control - accidents that might happen, illnesses that might trespass. But that's just me. I've always viewed motherhood less as drudgery than a privileged, almost animal state. A sort of constant readiness and permeation.

Although it is a state I will also be glad to emerge from with my brain intact. Currently going through my fourth teenager-hood, there are only so many hip music movements my poor little kitchen can stand. This year it's dubstep. Save me Scarlatti!

I remember reading one sour article that attempted to pour oil into the fire. The journalist formulated: At the end of the day, they all leave home. Sure. They do leave home. And no judgement should be passed by either party. There are those of us who burn to work, to earn our place, to jostle in society. I know women who bring home the bacon, guilty as hell because they are missing on birthday parties, carefree outings to the park, and yet who are tapped on the shoulder by mothers-in-the-know. One was reprimanded because her daughters were spotted wearing the same shirts two days running! And yet at the local pool I see mothers who plonk themselves on plastic chairs during their kids' swimming lessons, children so cardinally obese and unable to dress themselves without said mothers' scolding and quick hands.

It's not worth the fight. Yes, they do leave (not that any of mine officially have). And while some of us suffer from Empty Nest Syndrome, others are itchy to dust down their career itineraries, and find a different path to self-evaluation, economic independence, moving on.

It can be so exciting. As my wiser-than-me seventeen-year-old daughter told me recently: You've had your marriages, You've had your babies. Now it's time for you, Mum. Your career. Your writing.

My cake.



P.S. Anyone coming to the mumsnet blogfest on 10th November in London I would love to meet up! Send me a line.

P.S. The Barack Obama tablecloth was produced in Ghana for the President’s visit to the African nation in 2009. It was intended to be sewn into a special dress for the occasion, but it was way too beautiful to cut up so I'm afraid we use it as a tablecloth.

When Women Come Together

When women come together things happen. Big things. Significant things. To paraphrase an expression shared by a writer colleague over the weekend, in turn paraphrased from Mrs. Margaret Thatcher at the height of her powers: When something has to be talked about, call a man. When something has to be done, call a woman.

Last week I took part in the ninth edition of the Women's Fiction Festival in Matera, in Basilicata in southern Italy. Founded by international translator, writing powerhouse and successful author Elizabeth Jennings, the Festival must first of all be described as the only one of its kind in Europe.

Most internationals will have seen stunning glimpses of the Unesco Heritage site borrowed by Mel Gibson in 'The Passion of Christ', but for Liz and many of the other people involved in the extensive organisation of the event, the dramatic setting has been casa dolce casa for decades. Add to this a keen understanding of the isolation of most writers, the current leaps and bounds of the publishing industry, and an ardent wish to bring experts face-to-face with both dilettantes and authors with numerous novels under their belts, and you have the ingredients that have spurred on Liz, Mariateresa, Maria Paola and Giovanni in their orchestration of this year's enriching experience.

Matera Centrale, Piazza Moro. I step out of the train station into a regular modern Italian square. Apartment blocks, bus stops, parking lots. I know my way as I was here two years ago. The flight down from Venice to Bari was bumpy so I am glad to have my feet on the ground. I begin dragging my trolley down a normal street until at the end of it the centuries fall away. Carved out of a porous local stone called tufo, tiers of houses and villas and arched terraces and knotted stony paths cling to a wide crevice in the land. No modern constructions, no traffic. Just a wide sky, cascading music practice from the central music conservatorium, and this warm stone panorama. Bliss!

By some quirk of the internet I have booked myself a huge apartment where I had expected a vaulted cave as most bed-and-breakfasts provide. I realise I will be living large. Marble, leather, gilt. A breakfast that ranges from potato foccacia to ricotta and chocolate cake. Bring it on! This porridge-eater with an empty family-ravaged fridge is not afraid!

Leggo di Gusto. A taste for reading - is perhaps one way of translating the Festival strapline for 2012. Food and wine experts are providing extra courses this year, and I know there are also pasta-making classes with a local expert. But the main event - Publishing is a Button - is what many writers are here to learn about. Digital publishing, digital rights, maximising Twitter, crowdsourcing, the importance of having an agent, self-publishing. Liz has assembled an impressive range of American, English and European speakers who keep the audience taking notes. Talks are in English and Italian, and offer glances at the publishing climate in different countries. Liz's expert translating colleagues also provide simultaneous translations from both languages - so that the vaulted ex-convent sala looks like something of a UN session!

The afternoon programme involves one-on-one appointments with international industry 'gatekeepers' - agents and publishers - to whom authors may pitch their projects. That means: ten minutes of trying not to ramble or shove your synopsis into a publisher's face or sweat too hard or go hoarse or lose your silly straw hat. I'm interested in finding European publishers for DLC before she flits off to the Frankfurt Book Fair. So many people have wailed Why isn't it published in Italian yet?.

On Saturday night I join a panel of two Italian authors (Paola Calvetti, 'Olivia' and Patrizia Violi 'Affari d'amore') and journalist Cinzia Leone in the stunning central piazza. Nervous, trying to hide behind my rich ruby Chanel lipstick, I gulp down some wonderful red wine beforehand. I wonder if Toni Morrison ever had to do that? Somehow, I manage to raise a few laughs in italiano. Did I really talk about whips and linguistics in the countryside? It's scary, what can happen between your brain tickling and that fuzzy-topped microphone. Fortunately, the town is dotted with bars to celebrate afterwards.

But python heels on cobbles, crooked steps and semi-darkness, and several more wonderful drinks... I think an angel took me home that night.

Gestation

You have sex. You conceive a child, a new life inside of you. You throw up. You eat mushroom pizza for weeks, then die when your man brings the smell of mushrooms through the door. Not mushrooms!

You have a prawn in there, they point. Then a frog, then a fish. A wriggling fish. Two hearts within your skin. Two brains ticking. Two souls? That's tricky.

You are glowing. It feels so good. You are horny as hell. Sexy to boot. Then you get big, that's troublesome. No Guinness for nine months. Humph!

You give birth, over and over. It gets easier. It does, yes. There's a good reason why it's called labour.

You are skinny again. Other ladies broaden but you are whippet thin, wishing you were more womanly. You know, curves. It's not your fault.

Your children grow up around you. Now they have their own points of view, their temperaments, different tones of voice for other people, private things. Sometimes you see them in their tinier incarnations - jumping off jetties, asleep in a plate of spaghetti, wearing a bow tie at a birthday party. Other times the years feel so long, so long, and so many of them. The moving houses, the flights, the trees planted, the new snow, a bag of small ski suits to give away. So many many years.

You hear your daughter singing Handel from where you are parked in the street. You pray her singing exam will go well. You've seen her go from The Little Mermaid to Mozart. Her singing just makes you weep.

On audition day you both have dry-mouth.

You park well and are dressed in mother-mode in a slim skirt grazing your knees. Not too hip, your daughter says, Otherwise what will they think. She is so keen she wants to sing first.

But her name hasn't been added to the list. The adjudicators send her off for the paperwork. They won't let her sing.

You go to the office people. The people behind thick glass who say We can't help you. Whose eyes say, Get lost. Whose explanations are obtuse and heartless.

You step back from the glass telling yourself Don't swear, don't lose it. Don't erupt into the flaming foreigner slamming Italy. Explore all avenues. Be dignified.

You make an appointment with the Director, whose book you translated years ago.

You hold her sobbing in the street. Big wracking sobs. You are so freaking mad you can save your tears till last.

Literary Giants

Lately I've been in good company. Inspiring company. Daunting company. For the first time in the nine kid-muddled years that I've been in Italy I managed to drive to Mantova's September Literary Festival, a mere 100kms from this house, where a hive of local and international literary luminaries speak to enthralled audiences. I booked tickets. Toni Morrison. Aimee Bender. Nathan Englander. I warned teenagers there would be no taxi-service, few meals and zero rave parties at the house. They were warned. (That didn't stop me receiving random phone calls - Are you picking me up from singing? Do you have the email of that woman I'm working for next week?)

I escaped. Drove into the fields. Past Verona. Over Mantova's seedy lake along the spit towards the tapestry of Gonzaga castles, turrets and cupolas.

I parked. I rushed. I hobbled over cobbles the size of oranges. First, in front of Alberti's famous Renaissance cathedral, I saw the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o sitting in a bar. My heart began to thump. Three of my insolent teenagers studied this man's 'Devil on the Cross' for their IB exams, bringing scribbled-on copies to the table, talking about how the imprisoned author wrote his novel on scraps of paper - toilet paper! - while persecuted for his words.

I wanted to rush up. Sit down and talk. I've had a story accepted by a British review that has Ngugi on the Editorial Board, a story that took two years to go through their channels. I thought of the six degrees of separation theory from that film. Now there were none - between me and a world-famous writer!

** (Read my post Abuse, over on my short story blog)


Many years ago I went to Rome to visit a friend. She was huge with her first child. I was running circles around my toddler. It was so hot in Rome. She wore pigtails and we drank coffee.

She said to me some time later, when our boys were pre-teens and not too fond of each other. But how can you write? How can you write when you read the brilliant things that real authors write? The big ones? Doesn't that put you off?

It paralyses me, she said. She said she severed her writing dream because she knew she would never write like the writers she admired. Gave up. After that, I felt phoney and third-rate.

This week I remembered my friend's words. Her paralysis. Perhaps this is the risk you run when you are made tiny in a crowd swooning to Toni Morrison's words. You cannot help but think, Me? Call myself a writer? What on earth could I possibly have to say when there is this? These books? Already written and to be savoured?

I listened to Toni Morrison who is luminous and wise and I wanted to rush up and give her a hug. I listened to Aimee Bender with her views on craft swimming alongside the flux of magic on the page. I listened to Italian writer Ermanno Cavazzoni who said that a short story is 'qualcosa che meriti' - something that you deserve because you have put yourself in a position where you will be delivered a voice, a miracle. I listened to Nathan Englander and his stringent views on revisions.

Ah! It was almost too much. My paltry efforts, compared to their weighty words. I watched the Italians push up to have their translated copies signed, I watched beaming Ms. Morrison look out from beneath her hat rim at all the faces, all the hands, all the feathery open books.

How do you write? she had been asked earlier.

To write you must find out what you need. Do you need a sandwich? Do you need music? I find I need solitude. I don't like beautiful views, I don't want to be distracted.

All I need is a pencil and a yellow legal pad.

Glowing Reviews

Catherine McNamara's 'The Divorced Lady's Companion to Living in Italy' is the best thing since sliced bread. It has changed my life. It thrilled me from the first kinky words and I walked into elevators and doors gripping my copy. In bed I laughed like an insane woman – I just couldn’t get enough; I didn’t want it to end.

Catherine's book resounded with meaning for me: it has made me love prosecco and the Dolomites and the Italian language. It has improved my relationship with my children. Now, when I look at the High Gothic Duomo of Milan, I whimper. Thanks to Catherine's saucy characters and liberating vision of older women, I have realised that - if I really want to - I can wear purple and wield a whip.

Buy this divine book and you will find love, culture and prosecco in dizzying amounts...


Whaat? Where on earth did I find this review?

The truth is I wrote it ten minutes ago and think I could improve a few things.

This morning, having my Daily Mail hit, I read that crime writer R.J. Ellory has been caught out writing glowing Amazon reviews for his novel. Not only that, he has been mean and nasty about books written by his other authors in his field.

Catherine McNamara’s book is a sleazy, entirely non-feminist rant that leaves me wishing she would just shut up. I didn’t laugh once. Her ideas are disturbed, her dialogue sucks, she should be arrested for her syntax and lack of understanding of Italian culture. Not only that, she must be an irresponsible person who couldn’t cook to save herself, and probably slaps her children around and has a drinking problem. Definitely has a drinking problem. I would pay you not to read this book.

Mr. Ellory! Shame on you!

His reply: Everybody does it. Do they? Is this something I am not in on? Sure, I have asked friends and readers in a nice voice, And if you wouldn’t mind popping something up on Amazon or Goodreads, even if you hated it.. And one friend did reply, Well, write me a review and I’ll post it..

But naahh! I know there is huge competition out there. That writers can be slimey and buyers just show no good sense (50 Shades of WTF – thanks Downith!). But is this where it’s at these days?

Have you ever written yourself up in a review? Or tried to pull the others down a peg? Huh??

On Zadie

I don't have a lot in common with Zadie Smith. Zadie finished her university education while I am a drop-out who ran off to au pair in Paris. Zadie published her first novel to great acclaim while mine is still sitting in a cupboard, typed up on yellow paper and smelling of moldy house. Zadie has acquired a broad-based and supportive readership, some nitpicking detractors, and has won awards for her work, allowing her to build a career in teaching writing at a university level. She also writes delicate articles with a punch in reviews no less glorious than 'The New Yorker', dealing with issues dear to her heart. She is doubtless a hard worker with much talent, and has just published her fourth novel, already receiving glowing reviews.

Phew! Just taking a breath as there is so much to admire here.

And here's an even bigger difference. Zadie had her daughter in her thirties, while I started reproducing in my mid-twenties while I was a young diplomat's wife in Mogadishu, and then, ahem, continued my output over the next twelve years. Much has been said about having a career versus being a stay-at-home home. (Whose children are more intelligent and well-adjusted? Whose bunions are bigger?) But how does mothering affect creativity, that daunting endeavour?

In this week's 'Guardian' (which I feel less and less like reading for various reasons, not least of all the fact that they haven't reviewed my novel there!) I read an article accompanying a review of Zadie Smith's new novel 'NW', which struck a very familiar chord.

According to the newspaper, Smith said that 'motherhood had changed her in an extreme way', especially by nibbling away at her time and concentration. She says: 'I wasn't interested in 80-page chapters any more - I couldn't stay in that mindset for that period of time.'

And even more tellingly, she spoke about being shoved off the writing cliff into the freefall of childcare: '..there's no down time. I would stop writing and would have no chance to think about the book at all, nothing. Then in the morning, it was as if someone else had written it.'

Has anyone else ever felt this? After the school run, the escaped dog, the tipped-over rubbish, the maths homework lies, more washing, a missed train, stolen wallet, unpaid telephone bill, broken dishwater, nagging ex, unwatered plants, the odd fever... YOU THINK I CAN SIT DOWN AND WRITE ANYTHING MEANINGFUL NOW?

It's all about brain twisting, if you like. Gymnastics. Focusing. Not always easy, not ever easy.

What is interesting is that Smith then spins this brutal detachment into an advantage, saying that it also gives the writer essential distance, a crucial objectivity that is difficult to achieve when one is bathed in the work.

I do like this one. I am clinging to it.

* * *

I have an interview about my publishing experience up with Brit Writers!
www.britwriters.com