Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Three Glasses of Wine Have Been Removed from This Story A Novel by Marian Michener MICHENER, Marian. Female. Education: San Francisco State University, M.A. (creative writing). ADDRESSES: Home— Seattle, WA. Agent— c/o Spinsters Ink, 32 East First St., #330, Duluth, MN 55802-2002. CAREER: Writer and college administrator. WRITINGS: Three Glasses of Wine Have Been Removed from This Story: A Novel, Silverleaf Press (Seattle, WA), 1988, published as Dreaming under a Ton of Lizards, Spinsters Ink (Duluth, MN), 1999. SIDELIGHTS: In her novel Dreaming under a Ton of Lizards, originally published as Three Glasses of Wine Have Been Removed from This Story, Marian Michener tells the story of Olivia, a would-be writer whose dreams of success are foiled by her addiction to alcohol. She spends her days and nights obsessing about "Sister Wine," as well as her destructive relationship with her lover, Brooke. As Olivia realizes she must break her addiction, she takes the first steps toward sobriety and ends her relationship with Brooke. Olivia takes a job as caretaker of a remote cottage on the Oregon coast to concentrate and withdraw into her writing. By doing so, she manages to write about her path to addiction and how it has affected her life. Although she doesn't succeed as a writer, the process allows her to understand how her past contributed to both her addictions and new state of consciousness, which aids her in staying away from alcohol and beginning the long climb through life as a sober person. In Publishers Weekly, a reviewer praised Michener's "multifaceted and fresh" characters as well as her "down-to-earth details." In Lambda Rising, reviewer Debra Weinstein commented that although the book's structure, a series of flashbacks, is not as strong as it could be, "the strength of this book is in the [elegant] writing." BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES: PERIODICALS. Booklist, September 15, 1999, Whitney Scott, review of Dreaming under a Ton of Lizards, p. 233. Lambda Rising, December, 1999, Debra Weinstein, review of Dreaming under a Ton of Lizards. Publishers Weekly, September 20, 1999, review of Dreaming under a Ton of Lizards, p. 76. * MICHENER, Marian. Female. Education: San Francisco State University, M.A. (creative writing). ADDRESSES: Home— Seattle, WA. Agent— c/o Spinsters Ink, 32 East First St., #330, Duluth, MN 55802-2002. CAREER: Writer and college administrator. WRITINGS: Three Glasses of Wine Have Been Removed from This Story: A Novel, Silverleaf Press (Seattle, WA), 1988, published as Dreaming under a Ton of Lizards, Spinsters Ink (Duluth, MN), 1999. SIDELIGHTS: In her novel Dreaming under a Ton of Lizards, originally published as Three Glasses of Wine Have Been Removed from This Story, Marian Michener tells the story of Olivia, a would-be writer whose dreams of success are foiled by her addiction to alcohol. She spends her days and nights obsessing about "Sister Wine," as well as her destructive relationship with her lover, Brooke. As Olivia realizes she must break her addiction, she takes the first steps toward sobriety and ends her relationship with Brooke. Olivia takes a job as caretaker of a remote cottage on the Oregon coast to concentrate and withdraw into her writing. By doing so, she manages to write about her path to addiction and how it has affected her life. Although she doesn't succeed as a writer, the process allows her to understand how her past contributed to both her addictions and new state of consciousness, which aids her in staying away from alcohol and beginning the long climb through life as a sober person. In Publishers Weekly, a reviewer praised Michener's "multifaceted and fresh" characters as well as her "down-to-earth details." In Lambda Rising, reviewer Debra Weinstein commented that although the book's structure, a series of flashbacks, is not as strong as it could be, "the strength of this book is in the [elegant] writing." BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES: PERIODICALS. Booklist, September 15, 1999, Whitney Scott, review of Dreaming under a Ton of Lizards, p. 233. Lambda Rising, December, 1999, Debra Weinstein, review of Dreaming under a Ton of Lizards. Publishers Weekly, September 20, 1999, review of Dreaming under a Ton of Lizards, p. 76. * Recent Customer Reviews. 1. The Epoch Times is the first and only media that exposes the true nature, impact, and ultimate goal of communism. We explain its damage to our moral foundation and to Eastern and Western traditions. We also discuss the outcomes of socialism and its impact on countries’ economic and political stability. We believe that media has a duty to be upright and responsible to society. 2. 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In 2001, her fourth play, Humble Boy (it had three slender predecessors), became so successful it would have turned the head of the most humble playwright. It was a tragicomedy involving theoretical astrophysics and bees, not obviously commercial themes, and written for Simon Russell Beale, whom Jones did not know. By fluke, Jones's husband, actor Paul Bazely, was cast as Guildenstern to Beale's Hamlet and asked him if he would mind reading his wife's script. Beale responded with unHamlet-like decisiveness and enthusiasm and the rest is history: a production at the National, directed by John Caird, starring Beale and Diana Rigg, rave reviews, a London Critics' Circle Award and a transfer to the West End. The play was sophisticated, original and funny. Tom Stoppard complimented Jones on it and Andrew Lloyd Webber asked her to write the script for his new musical, The Woman in White. This month, she at last has a new play of her own, The Dark, her first since Humble Boy, opening at the Donmar Warehouse. We'll have to wait a little longer for The Woman in White (directed by Trevor Nunn) and starring Maria Friedman and Michael Crawford), but she is preparing to haunt us by the end of the summer. Charlotte Jones takes me by surprise. I feel at once as if she is a friend from another life. It is a sensation she describes in one of her plays - 'Sometimes you know people a long time before you meet them.' She is spontaneous, charming andeasy. Then there is her appearance. A photograph in the latest Vogue shows a stolid woman with an open face on a beach in Brighton where she lives. Interviews described her as 'down to earth', a wearer of flip-flops with a manner to match. But the reality is more complicated and far prettier. She has bright blue eyes, badly behaved hair and the presence of the actress she once was. We meet in the Old Vic's basement bar, an appropriately underlit venue in which to discuss The Dark. But first I want to know about The Woman in White. Wilkie Collins's glorious novel, with its many narrators, must be impossible to adapt. What can it have been like translating it into the script for a musical? It is the first time Lloyd Webber has collaborated with a woman on his creative team. He is 'tickled pink' and so is she. Everything about the experience delights her. 'Standing on the corner of St Martin's Lane talking to Trevor Nunn, I had an out-of-body moment, thinking: when I was an actress, could I ever have done this?' But when first approached, she was bemused. She was warned that Lloyd Webber was 'volatile' and that she would 'probably get sacked at some point'. But their first meeting was 'so sweet - he didn't look me in the eye once. He is shy, a sort of Victorian man'. If Lloyd Webber had seen the flat she was living in at the time of their lunch, she believes he would have felt he was saving her from the workhouse. Since then, she says with unmoderated gratification, she has been to his houses in Majorca and New York and 'his amazing country home in Berkshire'. But what she finds 'most intriguing' about him is the contradiction between his 'socially awkward' manner and his ability to 'write love songs that people hum all over the world'. Jones and Lloyd Webber are taking every kind of liberty with the book, which she finds 'very exciting'. They have introduced a seduction scene between Count Fosco and Marian Halcombe and an 'unrequited love strand to serve the musical'. They adore the book but see it as flawed, which Lloyd Webber believes is a great start for a musical. He is 'always challenging the structure of the script and nine times out of 10 is right'. Jones admires forthright Marian Halcombe (seeing her as a Victorian Carrie Bradshaw) and had to fight to ensure that Maria Friedman got the part. They had wanted a younger woman. Jones made the point that the Victorian woman might be permanently on the shelf by her late twenties but, to make modern sense of it, they must have someone in their mid-thirties at least. Jones quotes the novel's opening line: 'This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a Man's resolution can achieve.' She hopes to reverse the line. Charlotte Jones is indebted to The Woman in White, saying that the 'honing' of it influenced her own play which she sees as an 'experiment in concision and simultaneity'. The Dark is structurally ambitious. It involves three houses exposed in the way that doll's houses are. It is a tense, privacy-denying play (Big Brother was an inspiration) and there is only a thin wall between the ordinary and the psychotic. It involves power cuts in many senses, but shows no sign of a power failure in its author. Jones completed the first draft in a fortnight: 'It was the most wonderful feeling. Most writing is not like that. It was like a weird possession. ' She has a low, smoky voice which makes her sound older than she is (at 35, she has not caught up with her voice) and a reflective, kindly way of saying 'Yes' which leaves you unsure as to whether she might be thinking 'No'. The play was hatched in a café over a glass of wine with her friend, Anna Mackmin who directed her first three plays and is in charge of this one, but the origins of the play go back further, to Jones's wedding day. 'It was in Worcestershire, July 1998. On this freak Saturday, it was arctic, there were terrible storms and we had no power. It was like an entire marriage in a single day in which you run the gamut of despair and joy. Our friends rallied round and improvised a buffet and the best man said, "OK. Everything has gone completely wrong so we have got to sing now." Our original best man had died in the February before and at his funeral they had played "Somewhere Over the Rainbow". Someone who knew him well stood up at our wedding to sing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" and all the lights came back on. It was an incredibly hair-on-the-back-of-the-neck moment. It was full of moments like that.' Her plays include such moments too and the tragicomic character of her wedding recalls her work. 'Tonal shifts,' she volunteers, are her hallmark. And I notice that the more discomfiting the subject, the more likely it is to make her laugh. There is nothing self-pitying about her account of an anxious pregnancy (her son, Daniel, is 18 months now). But Humble Boy was on in the West End and everyone kept telling her how successful she was. She felt 'removed'. She didn't know if she would ever write again. On the page, without her amused voice, much of what she has to say is bleak. And, in retrospect, I can see the sense of knowing her was an illusion. Beneath the robust presentation, nothing is simple about Charlotte Jones. 'The play came from a dark place to do with having my first child. I suppose it was postnatal depression, but that's probably normal. It would be unnatural if you didn't have it, to a certain extent, because you lose your freedom, particularly at the beginning.' In the play, Louise, a young mother, is terrified of hurting her baby. Jones remembers: 'I was resentful of the baby's dependence on me, fearful that I would harm him inadvertently or that external forces would harm him.' She started to wonder: 'When would such thinking make you start to sin?' Normality and madness have been uneasy neighbours in Jones's earlier work, too. Her first play, Airswimming (1997) was set in a lunatic asylum. She wrote it as a 'resting' actress while working as a waitress. Taking orders from her imagination proved a wonderful reprieve from an unhappy period of trying to be an actress. She was back in control. And she excelled at it. A second play In Flame (1998), about two generations of women mirroring each other, transferred to the West End. And her third, Martha, Josie and the Chinese Elvis (1999), a wild party piece, won two awards. And then came Humble Boy. Jones grew up in Worcestershire and was educated at a 'lovely' convent with several 'mad nuns' for which she 'thanks God'. She went on to Balliol, Oxford to read English, where she discovered acting and still managed to leave with a First. She had always imagined she might become an academic and almost went to Trinity College Dublin to do an MPhil, but Webber Douglas drama school offered her a funded place and she accepted it. Within her family, she describes herself as a 'changeling'. 'My father,' she says, 'sells secondhand cars, which no one ever believes. But he tells me to say he is a used car sales manager. Mum is a housewife. My brother runs a sports shop.' They are thrilled by her career, 'especially about the musical'. And perhaps she is not unlike her father; she, too, minds being misclassified. She notes snubbing adjectives (women are 'quirky', men 'original'). And although she has been compared to Stoppard, Ayckbourn and Frayn - 'illustrious company' - she would like to occupy her own space. 'Even if The Dark fails, I hope what I am trying to do is recognised.' But she is not self-important. She has told her family that 'they don't have to come to see it. If it has a further life, they might but there is all the travelling, the changing. ' She stops to consider and laughs: 'And what would they do with the dog?' · The Dark is at the Donmar Warehouse, London WC2 from 18 March to 24 April. For tickets, phone 0870 060 6624. Spiky, thrilling, funny and moving: a Marian Keyes novel to convert the sceptics. IF YOU WERE to ignore all traditional advice and judge the books of Marian Keyes by their covers, you’d probably think they were, to put it bluntly, fluffy. Or cosy. Ever since the publication of her debut novel, Watermelon, in 1995, the covers of Keyes’s novels have tended to feature pictures of shoes, or angel wings, or flowers, or butterflies. But, as anyone who’s read a Keyes book knows, appearances can be deceptive. Those pastel covers concealed stories about addiction, infertility, depression and domestic violence, tales of bereavement and jealousy and serious illness. The books were also, as it happens, often very funny, but they were certainly not cosy. And the same goes for Helen Walsh, the heroine of Keyes’s brilliant new novel. Having already made memorable appearances in Keyes’s earlier books about the Walsh sisters, she finally gets the chance to shine in The Mystery of Mercy Close. Or, rather, the chance to glower. Helen is the youngest and grumpiest Walsh, and when last seen, in Anybody Out There (2006), she had started a private detective agency. Six years and one recession later, things aren’t going well: as she says, “private investigators are luxury items and me and the It bags came out of things very badly”. All her work has dried up, she’s lost her beloved flat and she’s had to move back in with her parents in the suburbs. Which means that when her ex-boyfriend Jay turns up asking for her help in finding Wayne Diffney, a member of the boyband Laddz who has disappeared from his house in Mercy Close just a few days before the group’s big comeback concert , she reluctantly agrees. She hates Jay, but there’s a lot riding on this huge event, and the money is good. And, besides, there’s not very much that Helen doesn’t hate. Irritable, prickly and capable of holding a deeply felt grudge against a child, Helen is a gloriously grumpy creation. When anything annoys her, she adds it to her Shovel List. “It’s more of a conceptual thing,” she explains. “It’s a list of all the people and things I hate so much I want to hit them in the face with a shovel.” There are many, many things on the Shovel List, including hot drinks, music (not just specific genres but music in general) and any sort of “spiritual” book or CD. Commercial women’s fiction is a more complex field than many of its detractors claim, but, even so, Helen is not a typical heroine of the genre. Not least because she’s living with severe depression. Keyes has written movingly about her own experience of mental illness, and in this novel she has written the most evocative depiction of serious depression I’ve ever read. Anyone who has ever struggled to understand what a person with depression is going through will find this novel revelatory. Keyes shows brilliantly that it’s a matter not simply a matter of feeling sad but of feeling wrong: “Everything looked ugly and pointy and strange, and I felt like I was living in a science fiction film,” says Helen. “Like I’d crashlanded into a body that was similar to mine and on to a planet that was similar to earth, but everything was malign and sinister. I felt like all the people around me had been replaced with doppelgangers. I felt very, very not safe. Uneasy was the most accurate description of how I felt, uneasy to the power of a million.” In the hands of a less skilled and subtle writer, Helen would get help for her depression, make a full recovery and live happily ever after. But, as the book makes painfully clear, sometimes the help doesn’t work. Sometimes a person can work her way through a serious depressive episode and emerge as a slightly different, slightly damaged person, a person who may eventually fall into that deep hole again and find it even harder to get out. And sometimes she won’t get through it at all. “People get sick and sometimes they get better and sometimes they don’t,” says Helen. “And it doesn’t matter if the sickness is cancer or if it’s depression. Sometimes the drugs work and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes the drugs work for a while and then they stop . . . Sometimes you wonder if no outside interference makes any difference at all, if an illness is like a storm, if it simply has to run its course and, at the end of it, depending on how robust you are, you will be alive. Or you will be dead.” The Mystery of Mercy Close doesn’t shy away from the grim reality of depression, though it’s anything but bleak. Keyes’s greatest strength has always been her ability to write very funny books about very dark subjects without any jarring shifts in tone, and this novel is no exception. Helen’s narrative voice is brilliantly consistent – her unsentimental account of her illness sometimes breaks the reader’s heart and her attitude to her romance with single father Artie is sometimes frustrating, but she remains wonderfully waspish throughout. And over the course of the novel her Shovel List expands to include such things as “active aging” (she doesn’t approve of the over-60s engaging in exciting activities when they should be staring out of their windows, observing things that will later be useful to an investigating private detective). But amusing as Helen’s grumpiness is, her mother, known to all as Mammy Walsh, is responsible for some of the the book’s funniest moments. When she starts speaking in an unusually sassy way, Helen asks: “Why are you talking like that? What shows have you been watching?” To which Mammy Walsh replies: “Ah, you know, the usual. America’s Next Top Model. Whatever is on.” There’s also a delicious streak of satire in Keyes’s picture of modern Ireland, particularly the affectations of the middle classes. (Helen and Wayne share an affinity for the Farrow and Ball-esque paint brand Holy Basil, whose colour chart includes paints called Gangrene, Quiet Desperation and Local Warlord.) And the book is also, rather wonderfully, a genuinely thrilling and well-constructed mystery. As Helen tries to find out the truth about Wayne’s disappearance, interrogating his neighbours, family and former bandmates, the reader becomes just as determined as she is to discover what happened to him. I hope Keyes writes about more of Helen’s investigations – not only is this surly detective too good a heroine to abandon after one book, but I’d love to see what else her creator could do with the crime genre. I hope this book will prove to the sceptical that just because a book has a pretty cover doesn’t mean it’s not complex and intelligent. Recently, tube stations in London were adorned with posters for The Mystery of Mercy Close bearing the words “Relax, Marian’s Back”. It’s snappy marketing, but it’s not quite accurate, because this isn’t a relaxing book. It’s an invigorating, spiky, thrilling, very funny and deeply moving one. And if people decide not to read it because the cover features girlie shoes and teapots and wine glasses, well, that’s their loss.