Bohumil Hrabal and his cats.

When we’d all made it through the winter, and spring had arrived, a small tabby cat showed up at our place and she was pregnant. By this time, Blackie was pregnant, too. The two cats loved each other and, because they were expecting, they followed me around incessantly. Wherever I went, they went, too, and I was always tripping over them, but nothing upset them as long as they could be with me. They would gaze at me adoringly and I knew they were looking to me to help them when their time came.

My neighbor, Mr. Eliáš, made me a bird feeder, an absurd looking contraption cobbled together from an old radio. He’d removed the guts, staved in the front panel, mounted it on a base that he fastened to a post, then drove the post into the ground outside his window, right where there was a break in the fence. Whenever I arrived at the cottage to tend to my cats and to write, I’d crumble some dry bread and oatmeal into the feeder for the sparrows and the titmice and the occasional jay.

I was horrified at the prospect of the cats having kittens. I was afraid they’d have them in my bed, as Blackie’s mother, Máca, had done. I worried about what we’d do with so many kittens and it killed me to think that if each cat had four kittens, I’d have to drown them. Not all of them, I’d leave the mothers two kittens each, but I’d still have to be the executioner, which is what I used to have to do in Nymburk, when no one wanted to drown the kittens and it fell to me, who loved cats, to be the one to do it, and to dispose of the bodies as well, and it was all because once, we kept all five kittens and when they were old enough to live on their own, no one wanted them, and we ended up with so many cats that we were constantly stumbling over them and then, as the devil would have it, four of the five kittens turned out to be female and within a year all four of them had young ones and we were as unhappy as my wife was later, when she’d complain, whenever she came to Kersko for the weekend: “What are we going to do with all those cats?” Read More

A sometimes brutal journey, the length of which we cannot know: making a book is like life in that way. How long it will run? Because a composed book is so finite-seeming, so finished-looking, dazzling even, trying to deconstruct and remember how it came together feels foolish, as if by doing so it might unravel again.

In 2011, I quit my big executive-director job running a global nonprofit to embark full time making my first book, The Yellow House. I had a book deal, and an advance that I thought would last longer than the year it did. I had no idea what I was doing.

I thought, at first, that I would simply follow the chain of the title to write an autobiography of a house. I had no idea of the tentacles, the ways in which the story would transfigure. I hadn’t known at the outset that I would ultimately need to find a foundation, a structure for the book solid enough to hold the story of my growing up on sinking and subsiding soil. Had not known how excruciating the task!

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Gustav Wertheimer, The Kiss of the Siren, 1882

Four surfboards leaned against the wall in an unfamiliar room on the far edge of the city. I’d woken up after two hours of sleep in a bed too small for two people. The concert the night before had been loud, the sound had come in not just through the seashell curl of the ears, but through the skin to the guts and the bones. It was December and before heading north toward home, we walked the beach—it’s easy to forget in the compression of steel and cement that the city touches ocean, too. We were quiet, tired, and stunned by the force of our recent collision. I squinted in the light, that unforgettable light, that pure, so-bright December light, there on a beach at the far rocky edge of the city.

“I need you to know that I’m vulnerable to you,” he said. “You have a power over me. Please use it wisely.”

This is not what one wants to hear.

Sirens sang at the edges. They sang on far rocky cliffs overlooking the ocean. The men who heard their song, it is important to note, were already at sea. Literal sea. Figurative sea. If you hear the Sirens’ song, you have already unhooked yourself from life on land, from the familiar conventions and constraints of family and routine. If you hear the Sirens singing, it means you’ve placed yourself in earshot, opened yourself to new music. It is important to note, too, that what looked like an edge to the men was the center for the Sirens. They sang, laughed, remembered to buy paper towels and to get the exercise they needed. What seemed so exotic to others, so enticing, was life as usual on the cliff.

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