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Main: Conversation With Deanna Adams

A Conversation with Author Deanna Adams
On Personal Village Keepers, "Bad-Boy Syndrome" and her Confessions

Not-so-good Catholic girl Deanna Adams grew up in the little-known Village of Lakeline, Ohio. She's stuck there.

If that were the whole story of writer Deanna Adams' life, she could not have produced the series of crisp, witty, honest, and specific essays that comprise her memoir Confessions of a Not-So-Good Catholic Girl. Deanna's a good storyteller, but she also has some things to tell us about living. "It's not where you live, it's knowing where you belong... and sometimes, it takes most of our lives to realize where that somewhere is... I actually belong right where I started in the first place."

Adams shares memories of meeting the Loving Spoonful when they stayed in the cottage next to her grandmother's at Euclid Beach Park and how seeing the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show gave a generation a license to rebel along with an attitude and lifestyle all their own. This author of Rock 'n Roll and the Cleveland Connection accomplishes what a memoir is meant to accomplish -- connection with the reader by telling the story of a life while showing us the lessons learned along the way. Like any good story, the protagonist changes, in this case from a girl who so badly misbehaved her mother sent her to an all-girls school to a woman whose grown daughters are given a list of instructions in the essay "What I Want to Tell My Children" and mourns the loss of her waist.

TThe words are tight and descriptive and solid. She describes the house she grew up in as a center of activity: “a stream of cats and kids would drift in and out of our house like Eagle Stamp Day at the May Company.” And on poker night relatives would come in the door “with arms full of penny jars and brown paper sacks of long-necked beer bottles and mason jars of caramel-colored liquor.” The stories are lively and the pace is brisk. She knows how to move a story along. An accomplished essayist, Adams flavors her work with metaphors like “runs smoothly through my grandmother’s side like fine whiskey.”

WWe have a complete sense of who Deanna was and who she has become. She’s a woman comfortable with who she is and glad to have arrived there. One of my favorite quotes is: “Funny, in childhood, we impulsively act on emotion. We feel like skipping, we skip... we must say and do what’s expected of us, and oftentimes, lose ourselves in the process. The child, and that freedom, is gone. Usually never to return. If we’re lucky, though, we come to realize that to be truly happy we have to be who we are, and true to our spirit—the authentic person inside us... I was yet to learn all this as a naïve, badly behaved, and confused fourteen-year-old Catholic hippie girl living in a Greaser world.”

I asked Deanna about her experience of writing the book, what she hoped to accomplish, and her life in an e-mail interview.

Cool Cleveland: Your website quotes Sue Monk Kidd’s book The Secret Life of Bees as saying “Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can’t remember who we are or why we’re here” which I think captures why people write memoir. Did Sue Monk Kidd’s book influence you to write Confessions of a Not-So-Good Catholic Girl? Or did you stumble upon that quote when you were reading the book and it said what you wanted to say so you used it?

Deanna Adams: Exactly! The catalyst for this book came when I was clearing out my Mom's condo after she died, and I was finding all these photos and letters and momentos and it got me to thinking about life, love and the legacies that are passed down and how it doesn't matter what generation we come from, we all go through the same kind of "stuff." I decided I wanted to write about it all, of course from the eyes and experiences of a baby boomer.

Your Prologue catches the reader’s attention by telling the story of how you almost drowned because of the Ruth family Gene and how you understood guilt and regret and thankfulness from the experience. You also hint at something else coming up in the book, the story of George Herman Ruth, aka Babe in Part Two). Later you write about becoming more authentic in middle age. Did you hold anything back in this book? Is this the same thing we'd find in your journal or did you borrow from your journal and throw that away?

I don't journal -- no time! -- and there are certainly things I hold back of course that didn't really need to be in there, but I also made sure not to hold back too much because the memoirs/essays that have always touched me the most were the ones where the author doesn't hold back and is honest -- showing the struggles, angst, conflict and ultimately how we evolve as we do and become who we really are. I wanted to show that, not only how I came into my own as a person, but also how my mother evolved into a happy, dance-loving person -- certainly not the one who raised me. I feel that was a real triumph of life!

50-plus years of life is a lot of material and you give us a lot of detail. How does one write about an entire life? How does one gather the material and form it into stories that capture an entire life?

'''It was hard of course, making each story connect, and some I didn't use because they ultimately didn't fit. But I wanted to show personal growth and how experiences help us grow and change. And that takes nearly a lifetime, I think. I simply went about it by organizing the stories as you would a novel, with an interesting opening, conflict, plotting it out, showing change and growth in the characters -- not just me, you'll notice, but my mother, too! -- and finally how we come to accept who we are and not try to be what others' expect of us. To be true to ourselves. And in my case, how faith saves us from ourselves sometimes.

Plus, I wanted this book to be a little different: a collection of stories about life, love and legacies, not a straight narrative because I think more people today prefer shorter pieces where they can pick it up, read a bit, then go back to it later. So yeah, it's a bit unique and I hope the risk of doing something different is ultimately successful.

In the acknowledgements, you thoughtfully mention your “personal village keepers,” which I love--can you expound on what you mean by that?

I have an amazing group of colleagues who keep me honest and will flag something in my work that's not working. They are indeed my literary support system and as I say in the acknowledgements, I believe no writer can produce anything worthwhile without that, not even the best of writers. I feel very lucky to have them, and they have helped make me a better writer.

As a middle-aged woman who grew up in the sixties and seventies, I can relate to this, a lot. Who’s your target audience? Other women, your family, or did you just want to tell the story?

Yes, I wrote it for baby boomer women like you! Mostly, that is. But it's funny, I'm getting just as much interest from men as women -- 'course I think that it's the title that gets their attention! (laughs) And everyone has family, and have had strained or difficult relationships, so the guys can definitely relate to that as well.

I love your description of “Bad-Boy Syndrome,” particularly because women all experience it and it’s true that some never get through it to find a man who can make her smile, AND I like the picture of the bad-boy all scribbled on and x’d out. That story was truly a “lessons learned” story—the lessons are good and universal.

Ah, Bad-Boy Syndrome. It's an epidemic. And I knew most women can relate to that! By the way, my 18-year-old daughter did the artwork on that bad-boy picture! My daughters' joke is that I'm always giving life lessons and that I'm prone to lecturing. But I'm big on self-improvement and find that every situation has its potential lessons, so that's what I wanted to convey. The humor throughout the book was very important to me, because no one wants to get lectured to, especially when they are reading. So I tried to make it fun and still get my message across. Though as you see, some of the stories have no real message -- they're just experiences we all share. And sometimes I just wanted to honor a life, like in Chapter 7.

Your speech at the Western Reserve Writer’s Conference this year expounded on how committed you are to helping others get started or keep going in their writing. Was there a particular experience that got you going on that topic, leading you to direct that Western Reserve Writer’s Conference and the Women Writer’s Winter Retreat?

This is a huge topic. Basically I had a couple wonderful mentors and knowing how we writers need each other for input, suggestions and critiques, I wanted to promote that. We all need workshops. I love books and the whole writing process and want to do my part in helping others keep the literary world alive and thriving.

What are the dates of the Western Reserve Writer’s Conferences this coming year?

The spring one, a half-day conference, is March 28. The full-day one will be on September 19.

Check out Adams' website at http://www.deannaadams.com and read some of Confessions of a Not-So-Good Catholic Girl. Then go out and buy it for any woman over 40. Or anyone who knows what it’s like to grow up in a small town, is afraid of the water, has parents who divorced, or is a parent whose sleep is disturbed by “Sense of Dread (SOD)”.

Adams holds a Book Signing/Reading for Confessions at Mac's Backs Bookstore 1820 Coventry Rd., Cleveland Hts on Saturday, January 24 at 7PM.

From Cool Cleveland contributor Claudia J. Taller ctallerwritesATwowway.com

Some Excerpts...

From Boy Trouble: The romance began in the principal’s office (where a girl is sure to meet the bad boy of her dreams). He was bold and brash—a lightning-strike version of a sleek Italian rebel with a full head of dark wavy hair, bulging brown eyes, and an attitude that would make John Gotti swell with pride. My mother hated Anthony straight up. Reason number one to call him mine.

From Suffering For My Art: When someone says, “Don’t take it personally,” you are bound to take it personally. Because it is. When they make it clear they don’t want you anymore, you’re right back on the school playground, the last one picked for the game. You are the unwanted morsel of candy—bit into, spat out, and left abandoned among the empty crumpled wrappers in the 16-oz. box of chocolates. You are the wad of repugnant chewed-up Juicy Fruit stuck underneath the school desk, or church pew. You are the unsolicited piece of junk mail that is so unwelcome people angrily rip you up into microscopic pieces before tossing you in the garbage - then complete the act by dumping stale coffee grounds on top of you like a ceremonial burial. 

No matter how much you ache to leave a job, or a marriage, you want to be the one who leaves. Not the one who is left. 

From Confessions of a Not-So-Good Catholic Girl: “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been, uh . . .  um . . . I think . . . no . . . I guess . . . well, maybe . . . uh, probably about . . . four months?  . . . since my last confession.”

I’ve always found this holy practice bizarre. There you are, kneeling in a pitch-black closet, confessing all your ungodly behavior to an authoritative voice that will judge you without even knowing that you’re really not all that bad a person. This, after actually having waited in line to totally rat yourself out. This, after having memorized your sins because you can’t bring the long list into the confessional since it’s too damned (oops, sorry God, I’ll add that to the list) dark in there. Still, you’re supposed to keep track of each and every trespass because the numbers are important to measure out the penance. You are then forced to underplay your crimes—slyly altering possible mortal sins to venial—because you don’t want this Man of God thinking poorly of you. You then ask for forgiveness and hope The Voice bestows a light sentence. (You’ve already increased those odds by going to Father A, the kind one, rather than Father B, who’d make his own mother say the entire rosary. Twice. And with feeling.)

What It All Means: I believe life is a test, the multiple choice kind. Like when Dorothy and the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz must decide which direction to take at the four-way crossroad. The fearful ones choose to turn around and go back. The doubtful ones choose not to choose and stay stuck in neutral. The brave ones make a decision and venture on. Perhaps we’re given these tests to see what we do with our dilemmas. How we handle our relationships with the people in our lives. We’re not supposed to have all the answers. It’s the process, the journey, as they say, that provides the best memories—and some of the best stories. . . .

And precisely what you’ll find in this new book by Deanna Adams.