Kinsey Millhone Is My Kind of Dick
One very terrible summer, I was jobless, in the wake of a breakup, and looking at the wrong side of thirty-five. “I don’t know what to do with myself,” I told a librarian friend. “Read the Kinsey Millhone mysteries,” she said. “They’re bestsellers for a reason and there’s a ton of them.” By the summer’s end, lone-wolf private detective Kinsey had become my first fictional bestie since I’d ostensibly grown out of rereading Harriet the Spy at age 12. (I never really did.)
It’s no coincidence, that Harriet connection. Grumpy, idiosyncratic, and eminently decent, the subject of Sue Grafton’s bestselling alphabet series is the sort of tough-guy tomboy rarely found outside of children’s literature to all of our detriment. Like the love child of Mickey Spillane and Ramona Quimby, Kinsey suffers no fools and is only partially domesticated. Orphaned young, divorced twice, and child-free, she’s a former cop who prefers pickle and peanut butter sandwiches over salads, lifts free weights, cuts her own hair with nail scissors, and owns only one dress–a wrinkle-resistant black number for when she can’t get away with jeans and turtlenecks. Shacked up with a Japanese bobtail cat Ed in a garage apartment owned by Henry, her eighty-eight-year-old retired baker of a best friend, she regularly swills cheap white wine and frightening goulash at the local tavern with a handful of cops whom she sometimes dates and consults in the delightfully lo-fi world of 1980s Santa Teresa, a fictionalized Southern California town resembling Santa Barbara, where Grafton lives part-time. Continue Reading →
Captain’s Log
I’m writing so well today that I almost don’t mind what a total nightmare of unhappy blankness the weekend was. Almost. We use social media to connect and to trumpet our pretty times and political views. But what about when the turmoil lands so hard it’s impossible to leave the house or say even a word? These are heavy times—mercury retrograde eclipse season heavens raining vengeance upon us times (literally) and it doesn’t help at all that I’m channeling harder and deeper than I ever have but for my own work. Sometimes writing this book is like taking dictation from an Old Testament-style Cassandra. Other times it’s like listening to a noseybody neighbor run amok. Either way, it’s heavy pizza, man.
Yesterday was awfully nice in New York, or so I hear. I got dressed to go out and then found I simply couldn’t. Couldn’t cook, couldn’t talk, really couldn’t face all the brunchers and flaneuzies still writing the story they’re dying to tell their someday grandkids. In a sane society–and what a utopian concept that is just about now-there’d not only be a fully blown National Endowment for the Arts but a sort of coast guard for those of us drowning in the heaviness of our creative projects.