Ever wonder why it’s so hard to stay positive? Why we like cop shows? Why we rubberneck at accident scenes? Why we complain about the bad when we are most certainly surrounded by so much more good?

Following is a long quotation from a long-winded man who lived long ago, the English essayist and critic William Hazlitt. The man was brilliant, prolific, multi-talented—and, according to historians, both cantankerous and undeappreciated. This passage is from his essay “On the Pleasure of Hating,” written in 1826 or thereabouts. The original is 4,763 words, so don’t get all grumpy about reading this 163-word quotation:

“Nature seems (the more we look into it) made up of antipathies: without something to hate, we should lose the very spring of thought and action. Life would turn to a stagnant pool, were it not ruffled by the jarring interests, the unruly passions, of men. The white streak in our own fortunes is brightened (or just rendered visible) by making all around it as dark as possible; so the rainbow paints its form upon the cloud. Is it pride? Is it envy? Is it the force of contrast? Is it weakness or malice? But so it is, that there is a secret affinity, a hankering after, evil in the human mind, and that it takes a perverse, but a fortunate delight in mischief, since it is a never-failing source of satisfaction. Pure good soon grows insipid, wants variety and spirit. Pain is a bittersweet, wants variety and spirit. Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust: hatred alone is immortal.”

Yes, the concept of hatred is more complex than Hazlitt’s musing, and it can be a devastating force in the world. I’m not trying to condone the terrible things human beings do to each other, nor the festering animosity that eats so many alive. I really do want world peace! All I’m trying to do is acknowledge that when we admonish ourselves to focus only on the positive, we just might lose our ability to actually appreciate the positive. Bazillions of poets and philosophers have noted that without darkness, we wouldn’t recognize light.

Which is all to say that I have compiled a list of things that I hate for a very important reason: I was in the mood to do so. Sure, it sounds negative, but that can be okay sometimes, a fact I have proven with Hazlitt’s quote and my own conclusive, airtight rationale above. (Hey, this is a goshdarned blog post, not a textbook on psychology, all right? Just let me air my little list here, okay? Is it gonna kill ya? I promise to write another blog someday on things I love, too. Fair enough?)

So here goes.

I HATE long drum solos, leaky roofs, flubby bacon, stupid books, hangovers, squash bugs, skin flaps, assault rifles, sticky countertops, zero bytes, stinky feet, cold ramen, Candyland, fire ants, snooty cats, acne scars, Budweiser, goat cheese, gifted liars, bra shopping, pack rats, chicken gooeys, varicose veins, milky skies, speed bumps, scratchy clothes, overdraft notices, muffin tops, parent-teacher conferences, white chocolate, reminding my mom of things she’s forgotten, dentist bills, food with tentacles, writing résumés, the accents on the word “résumés,” snow that melts by noon, the WTO, gritty salad, calling Verizon, when people remember my name and I can’t even remember their face, disobedient hair, bad breath, fracking, deadbeat dads, fast-tracks to sainthood, broken windows, wrong-way drivers, microwaved baby formula, austerity budgets, fake butter, deadbeat moms, sectarian violence, okra, the Koch brothers, burnt coffee, raw marshmallows, NAFTA, dried up cat food stuck to a plate, vomiting, food pictures on Facebook, rufies, backaches, the KKK, policies that keep people poor, twerking, stubborn gray roots, shag carpet, airplanes, crotch odors, funerals, dirty motels, the drug trade, lima beans, nosehair, ISIS, the songs “Under My Thumb” and “Run For Your Life,” plagiarism, gum stuck to carpet, brown tides, porn, glass coffee mugs, mosquitos, full ashtrays, boxing, menudo, mean dogs, scotch, aspartame, sticker residue, pissy cats, drivers who scream, living with slobs, flat tires, slasher movies, slow metabolisms, clogged toilets, Hallmark movies, know-it-alls, credit card debt, paper cuts, sloth, hard-water deposits, gabardine, reality TV, vinaigrette, missing a Seinfeld reference, cancer, appeal letters, Christmas trees on curbs in January, the Taliban, not being thanked, wasted leftovers, neck piercings, gang wars, grizzle, gophers, and when bad people win and good people lose.

Thanks for listening.

What do you hate? I’m listening…

I’ve been thinking a lot about stories lately. Or rather, I’ve been reading a lot of other people’s thoughts about stories lately. Google “story” and you get boatloads of insipid memes and pictures of bookstacks with cups of tea and exhortations to write, write, write and read, read, read.

But let’s set literature aside for the moment and focus on personal stories.

I love and need stories as much as the next person. We all need narratives to explain our lives. Stories help us wrap our heads around challenging experiences, take the long view on complex matters, cherish the sublime, and come to terms with dark and terrifying experiences.

But we forget the flipside of this: Stories can just as easily obscure the truth, and words can be their weapons.

Consider the deeply chilling UVA gang-rape story that appeared in Rolling Stone in November. I know that some of the reporting is under question, but what stays with me is the phrase “bad experience.” At one point, a female student being interviewed by Sabrina Rubin Erdely points to a frat house and explains that her friend had a recent “bad experience” there.

Hello? How about “My friend was the victim of rape in that house, a felony crime”? This form of sexual battery carries a prison sentence of five years to life in Virginia. Hmm. Sure sounds like a super-duper bad experience to me.

And now the Japanese government is spinning a story about the 80,000 to 200,000 women who were forced into government-sanctioned, institutionalized prostitution during World War II. No, they say: These “comfort women” were not provided to Japanese troops for sex by Imperial Japan’s military authorities, a crime that Amnesty International calls “one of the world’s biggest cases of human trafficking.” According to the Abe administration, they were prostitutes who followed the camps of their own volition. Forget the thousands of survivors’ stories of abduction and abuse—those sluts must have wanted it.

Maybe, just maybe, “sex slave” is a more accurate term than “comfort woman.”

Those thousands of women worked in what were called “comfort stations.” One wonders: Who exactly experienced comfort in those places? Certainly not the women, but I can’t even imagine a soldier deriving comfort from having sex with a woman who might have been forced to have intercourse with fifty to a hundred men a day.

(As an aside here, at Jones Beach State Park, near where I grew up on Long Island, the bathrooms have always been called “comfort stations.” Bizarre.)

Of course, the study of euphemisms and word connotations is nothing new. We’ve all noticed the power of word choice: Is your boyfriend slender, or is he scrawny? Are those shoes affordable, or are they cheap? Just look at the progression of what we call people whose limbs don’t function as planned: Over the past sixty-odd years, the terms have shifted from “crippled” to “handicapped” to “disabled” to “physically challenged” to “differently-abled.” The examples are endless.

But back to stories.

It is de rigueur these days to embrace all of our experiences as essential to our growth. Yeah, yeah, we know your grandma said whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and serendipitous things happen that make fate seem completely real, and the stupid things we’ve all done make great fodder for tales told ’round the fire.

But I’ve also heard some truly hideous tales minimized by this kind of thinking. A teen once told me she wouldn’t trade her tough experiences for anything because they made her who she is today. She had been raped at a young age, her father had beaten her mother and their children for years before he abandoned them, and her family was living in poverty. As much as I admired her resilience, I couldn’t help but think her response was just a coping mechanism derived from a story that others had told her. Some well-meaning person—a relative, a teacher, a counselor, a priest—had likely said, “Embrace it all.” I assume this was to help her overcome those truly tragic experiences enough to get through her daily life. But seriously, who wouldn’t change any of that if it were possible? Encysting an infection so the greater organism can continue to function is all well and good—and highly practical. But let’s be truthful about what’s being encased in that little sac, and let’s remember that stories can good or bad, helpful or damaging.

I was complaining to my mom the other day about some disappointing thing and I ended the bitch session with the pat adage, “It could always be worse.” She then surprised me by saying, “It could be better, too.” Way to go, Mom. Let’s be real with ourselves. If we’re not, we run the risk of forgetting to search for the truth and to fight to change what’s wrong in the world. We run the risk of lying to ourselves with stories.

I’ve often joked that if any of us are ever struck with amnesia and forget even our own names, we can just do a Google search and look at the ads that pop up for a clue to our identities: Oh yeah, I’m a middle-aged woman who lives in Santa Fe and I could stand to lose some belly fat. Now I remember.

But once you tell the interwebs a little more about yourself, like you just published a book, then the ads and the suggested posts and pins and tweets get more and more focused. I’ve shared some of the items that come my way because it seemed the thing to do: Umberto Eco, Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison, and a host of other heavyweights have plenty to say about writing, and who am I to ignore their wisdom? No prob—I’ll pass it on.

But what about the other stuff? The funny thing is, these customized book-related ads and posts have even less to do with me than does the “Santa Fe Mom” who wants to tell me about the “5 Foods to Never Eat.” (If you don’t see that ad every time you launch Google, then you must be young, male, and/or very fit.)

Here’s the thing: I’m a writer and I love books, but not in the way the search engines and social media platforms assume I do.

First, I don’t need any bookcases, so the American Home Furniture ads can just shut up about it. To me, a great book is like a great meal—far better when shared. To a large degree, my favorite books are the ones I don’t own anymore because I’ve passed them on to other passionate readers.

Second, although I’m always reading, I am the worst, the absolute worst person in the world, when it comes to reading the hottest new books. It’s not that I’m not interested in what’s new—I can spend hours in my favorite bookstore, Collected Works in downtown Santa Fe, admiring well-designed covers and skimming jacket blurbs and standing riveted as I read passages from whatever book my hand just touched. I do my best not to crack the spines as I ogle their wonderfulness, wishing I could take every one home.

But I’m also a busy, distracted, and sort of oblivious person. I wear clothes that haven’t been in style since the first Obama administration—or maybe even the first Bush administration. I forget I’m supposed to hate my kitchen cabinets because whitewashed maple hasn’t been it since 1990. I don’t have time to want things like Pandora bracelets. And although I probably shouldn’t admit it, I read in the same way.

In addition to the young beauties that woo me at Collected Works, I also love wallflower books—the overlooked novels of otherwise-famous writers, odd paperbacks that friends lend me, books that emerging authors ask me to review, lovingly worn books I find at garage sales, books that jump out at me in the library, and the classics I never got around to reading in college, which are anything but young and freshfaced. Sure, new books thrill me, but in truth, I’m a pretty democratic, equal-opportunity reader—nearly all books thrill me.

So when I finally get my author pages set up on Kindred Readers and Goodreads and I begin to build my “bookshelf,” it might not look as zippy and fashionable as one might expect. Think of it as a place where you can enter and relax, where books are not judged by their covers or by their reviews on Amazon. This isn’t high school, after all, where worth is so often judged by looks and popularity. This will be the real, adult world, a place where books of all stripes can be loved and appreciated for who they truly are. 

So I wrote a book. It took an eternity, but I finally finished it. It made its way through two literary friends and an editor and a proofreader and a designer and a printer and here it is in my hand. Right now. And that’s just weird.

Writing this book has been a highly creative—and highly private—process. I felt like a minor god over the past seven years as I invented characters and decided their fates. I sat for thousands of hours with my scotch-taped laptop, my butt spreading as I scoured my brain for all I knew about human nature and attempted to translate that knowledge into the words and actions of those characters. I worried about those invented people as if they were real—Rosemary, Liam, Dylan, Mark, Martina, and Deet, among others. When they suffered, I gnashed my teeth. When they triumphed, I cheered. When they died, I cried. But the thing is, it was all me. It was mine. (And it was FUN.)

I don’t mean to pretend that it was easy. Sure, I had crises of faith and worried that the book was crap. (Oh, did I really write that last sentence in the past tense? Good one, Barb.) Sure, I rewrote the prologue three times. Sure, I was crestfallen when my early readers warned me that certain parts didn’t make sense, or that a beloved passage needed to be cut. That’s just writing, which is something I’ve done my whole life. But this was different.

And it’s still different.

Love and Death in a Perfect World. It’s here in my hand. Tomorrow, friends and family will come to my house for a book launch party, and they can all take an advance copy home, if they choose. I hope they like it. I hope they review it. I hope they tell all their friends and acquaintances what a swell book it is and that all those people buy ten copies each and I can pay off all my credit cards. I hope it’s a really big show, as Ed Sullivan would say.

But for right now, I find myself quiet and apprehensive. I think I’m in some strange state of mourning. We’ve all heard the aphorism that whenever we gain something, we also lose something. Well I guess it’s just that for the past fifty years, I’ve been a private person who has never published a work of fiction. Sure, I’ve had hundreds of journalistic articles published, but not fiction, and certainly nothing of this length (367 pages!) or depth (just my soul—no big). I’ve also done my best to keep a low profile online and to hide from Big Data. But in the past seventy-two hours, I’ve launched a public Facebook page, a Twitter feed, two Pinterest boards, and this blog.

So the intensely personal process of writing a novel has ended, and the intensely public process of publishing that book has begun. Wish me luck.