On Ritual

I've spent a great deal of refreshing time off line in the last 10 days while practicing for and singing in the Temple Beth El choir for the High Holy Days. That detox was really needed, especially given how ugly things have become recently.

I'm one of those people who always reads the footnotes and the acknowledgements when I read books, and when I'm in synagogue I'm no different - some of the most interesting stuff about the Torah is found in the commentary. This quote about ritual in the High Holy day machzor really struck a chord with me:

"Ritual fills the human need for completeness. It speaks to the depth of human emotion by giving a specific form to work through diverse emotions."

This resonated with me on so many levels. Firstly, as the parent of a kid who grew up on the autistic spectrum, I know how important ritualistic behavior can be for dealing with emotions like anxiety, anger, insecurity, even happiness.

But it's not just for those on the AS. Go through the experience of losing both of my parents in rapid succession, Dad to the long, slow, painful goodbye of Alzheimer's and Mom to the sudden, unexpected and no change to say goodbye of a DVT, made me appreciate how humane and necessary the rituals of shiva and mourning in the Jewish faith are to dealing with grief. Shiva, while exhausting, reminds you that you are not alone in your grief, that you are loved, and that you have community to support you. In the case of my dad, where I'd only been allowing myself to remember my dad as he was at that very moment during the Alzheimer's descent, because thinking about him as he was before was too painful, shiva was a time where we all could start to reconnect back with "real Dad" - the one we'd started to lose so many years before. We put together a slideshow that played throughout of pictures of him throughout his life and it gave us a chance to talk about him and tell stories and remember the man we missed so much and had been missing so much all through the Alzheimer's journey.

With Mom, her death was so sudden and unexpected, and came so soon on the heels of losing Dad, that the grief felt like it was bottomless and never-ending. But I had children, book deadlines and a mortgage and health insurance to pay. I couldn't let myself give into the grief. I had to get up and persist - as one does. But the grief was there, always. The ritual of going to synagogue to say kaddish for a year was healing because it meant that I wasn't just allowed, but prescribed to recognize that I was still mourning, even though I was still having to pick myself up and get on with life, because that's what you do.

On certain Jewish holidays, there's the Yizkor service, in which we remember those who have passed on before us. In Orthodox Congregations, they ask everyone whose parents are still living to leave. Because I'd been attending an orthodox congregation before my parents died, I'd never been in a Yizkor service until after my father died. I remember the Yom Kippur service very shortly before Dad died. I'd spent Kol Nidre with him instead of going to services, and I knew he wasn't going to make it until the following year. When my son and I went outside for Yizkor, I started crying and I said to my son, "This is the last time I'm going to be outside for Yizkor." And it was.

Now I attend a conservative synagogue and I realized yesterday as I was crying my way through the beautiful Yizkor service that there were young kids in the room and that people hadn't been asked to leave if their parents were alive. I was talking to my husband about it this morning, and we both thought how much healthier it is. Sure, kids might get scared by seeing their parents cry, but they also realize that mourning people you love is natural and part of life - and that it's okay to cry. I remember when I was at Silver Hill, and I told the psychiatrist that I always cried in the shower because I didn't want my kids to see me cry. He said: "What's the matter with letting them see you cry?"

That was one of the "aha" moments when I realized that it was okay to be human, not "perfect".

There are so many different kinds of ritual that can provide comfort - they don't necessarily have to be religious. But there is comfort and meaning in ritual - especially when community is a part of it.

Speech: Ferguson Library Friends Literary Awards, April 17 2016

I constantly joke with my kids that you’re never a hero in your own hometown. But after today I’m going to have to stop saying that, because being asked to speak as an author at the Ferguson Library where I spent so many hours growing up, makes me feel like I am a hero. So I’d like to start off by thanking you for this incredible honor and privilege.

I’m a passionate supporter of public libraries, and especially the amazing librarians who work in them. Librarians made me writer. But just as importantly – or perhaps even more importantly, they helped to make me a thinker.

When it comes to literacy I confess that I started life on first base – maybe even on second. That’s because I was born into a family of readers and a home filled with books. But even within my family, I had a voracious appetite for the written word – I was the kid in the family who was kept getting caught under the covers reading with a flashlight when I was supposed to be asleep.

To satisfy my book cravings, Mom brought us to the library every week and I got to pick out a new stack to bring home. One reason why I feel fortunate to have grown up when I did rather than now is that, I never, ever, had a librarian, parent, or teacher say “Sorry, Sarah that book is above your Lexile level.” The grownups in my life just kept handing me interesting, challenging, books and I kept on reading them.

If I didn’t know the meaning of words – and I often didn’t – I learned to figure them out from the context of the sentence or if I really got stuck I’d ask my parents. But Mom and Dad never answered my question directly. Instead they’d point me to the “Shorter” Oxford English Dictionary and tell me to look it up. Now here’s some insight into the way my brain works. As I was writing this I suddenly thought: I wonder how much that thing weighed? So I went and got it off the shelf and put it on my kitchen scale. This sucker weighs almost 9lbs – imagine having to haul that around when you were a little kid wanting to know the meaning of a word.

Living in the social media age, I then felt compelled to tweet how much the Shorter OED weighs because the people who follow me on my author account would probably be interested in that kind of thing. And Robin Powell, a childhood friend of mine from England saw the picture and sent me back a picture of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary my parents had given him for his Bar Mitzvah in January 1973. In the flyleaf was an inscription written by my father: “It’s never winter in the land of HOPE and it’s never dull in a dictionary. Use this book a lot and reap its rewards.”

My father died two and half years ago after a long journey with Alzheimers, so seeing what he’d written 43 years ago made me pretty emotional. But it also made me realize that this apple didn’t fall far from the tree.

I was curious about the phrase “It’s never winter in the land of Hope” and I wondered if it was from a book. So I Googled it and it turns out it’s a Russian proverb. What’s interesting about that is my Grandpa Harry, who died when I was 11, was from the Ukraine, and so I wonder now if it’s a proverb my father heard from his father.

One of the things we lose with e-books is discovering these kinds of gifts from the past in books. But that’s not the only thing we lose with technology. When my parents made me look up a word in the dictionary, in the process I’d inevitably find other interesting words on the page around the word I was looking up, and so I’d end up further developing my vocabulary and love of language. By just entering the one word you don’t know in a web browser and getting the definition in seconds, you lose the magic of doing that.

I was also fortunate because my parents never censored my reading. They put the so-called “inappropriate books” on the top shelf, but they also always had a set of library steps in the room so that we could get to those books on our own when we were old enough to be curious.

I followed this strategy with my own kids. When my daughter Amie was in middle school, the film version of Alice Sebold’s book “The Lovely Bones” came out, and most of her friends were reading it. Amie asked me if we had it – which we did, because I’d read it many years before, and then wanted to know if she could read it.

I didn’t say no. What I did was discuss the book with her. I told her it was a thought provoking book and well written, but the first chapter was very upsetting to read. Because she had nightmares sometimes, I worried that it might be too much for her so my advice would be to wait a year or two. But I told her that I would leave the decision up to her, and if she really felt like she wanted to read it, the book was on the shelf, hers for the taking. She took my advice and waited.

That’s why I get very angry when parents try to censor books for other people’s children or ban books from school libraries. What they are doing is abdicating their own job as parents. It’s all about the conversations we have. Different kids are ready for different books at different times, and that’s why trained librarians are so incredibly important, both in our public libraries and in our public schools.

It’s thanks to librarians that I Journeyed to the Center of the Earth, went 20,000 Leagues under the Sea and Around the World in 80 Days with Jules Verne. It’s thanks to librarians that I solved the mystery of the Hound of the Baskervilles with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Because of librarians I went from wealth to poverty and back again like A Little Princess and discovered a Secret Garden with Francis Hodgson Burnett. Because of librarians I asked G-d if he was there and discovered how to improve my bust with Judy Blume.

Not long after my first book, CONFESSIONS OF A CLOSET CATHOLIC, came out, I met Judy Blume at the memorial service for my mentor, the late Paula Danziger.. I wanted to tell her how much she inspired me, not just because of her writing, but because of her passionate advocacy against censorship. The problem was I literally, couldn’t talk. 12 year old Sarah inside was like: “OMG OMG – I’M STANDING 18 INCHES AWAY FROM JUDY FREAKING BLUME!”

It just goes to show that even middle-aged authors can be utter and complete fangirls.

I knew I wanted to be a writer when I was in high school, but I didn’t try to write a book until I was almost forty. Even thought my parents always acknowledged that I was a talented writer, I was given the same message back in the late 70’s that I hear constantly from politicians and business leaders today: “You’ll never make a living as an English major.” So even though writing was what I loved, and literature was my passion, I majored in political science and got an MBA in Finance. I worked on Wall Street as a financial analyst, until I met my kids’ dad and moved to a small village in Dorset, England where by marrying I doubled the Jewish population (and by having Josh and Amie tripled and quadrupled it). I put my MBA to use by managing the finances of the family’s dairy farming and cheese making enterprise. If you want to know about the lactation yield curve of a dairy cow, I’m your girl, but in the 17 years I’ve lived in Greenwich it’s never once come up at a cocktail party.

But all along, a voice inside kept saying “I want to write.” I ignored it, because I was doing the things that everyone expected me to do: making a living, being a good daughter, a good wife, and a good mother. It wasn’t till I was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown at age 38 that I realized I didn’t want to end up in a nursing home at the end of my life thinking, “What would have happened if?” I was so busy being an overachiever that it took all my bricks falling down to finally give me the clarity I needed to build myself up in a stronger way. I knew then that I had to give myself the chance to pursue my long held dream of being a writer, even if I failed, because I’d rather have tried and failed than never have tried at all.

The good news is that I didn’t fail. Since that hospitalization in 2001, when I finally gave myself permission to write, I’ve written fifteen books, eight in my own name and seven under a pseudonym. I get emails from readers all over the United States and from abroad, too – my books have been translated into German, Greek and soon, Serbian.

When you get emails from teenagers saying: “I really loved your book, like more than I love the world! It felt like you described my whole life” or simply “Thank you for helping me,” - well let’s just say it’s so much more pleasant and rewarding than the comments I get from grown ups on my political columns. The emails I get from my teen readers remind me why it’s worth fighting every day to try to make the world a better place, even on the days when the hateful comments I’m getting from adults make it especially hard to be courageous.

I’m going to finish up with a few pieces of advice based on the things I’ve learned from my long, circuitous and somewhat unconventional journey to doing what I have no doubt is my G-d given purpose in life.

The first is something I learned from my father, and that’s to always be aware of what is going on in the world around you. Inspiration is everywhere, but you have to be paying attention.

The second is something I learned from my mother and that’s to be a good listener. Writers are like sponges – constantly listening to the people and ideas and dialogue, because we never know when something might be useful for a book.

The third is from me – and that’s don’t ever lose your curiosity. Writing is the perfect career for me because it’s lifelong learning. Each of my books begins with a question, which I start off by researching. One of the best parts of my job is that I get to interview really interesting people about what they do as part of the research process. Some people I’ve interviewed include a supervisory special agent at the FBI in New Haven, an emergency room doctor, a talent agent, a Catholic priest, the senior Naturalist and education specialist at Greenwich Audubon, an employment lawyer, and the head of the Special Victims section at Greenwich police. Using the information I learn from my research, I then create situations where my characters can help me work through the answer to the question I want to answer in the book.

But the most important piece of advice if you want to be a writer comes from Jane Yolen, who’s an incredibly prolific and successful author, as well as being the first cousin once removed of Stamford resident and travel writer, Malerie Yolen-Cohen. I heard Jane speak at a writing conference about ten years ago and the best advice she gave was: “Get your butt in the chair and write the damn book.”

Because in the end that’s what makes the difference between me and the people I meet at cocktail parties who tell me “Oh, I’d write a novel if I only had the time.” The difference is that I made the time. I wrote in doctor’s office waiting rooms and carpool lines while waiting to pick up my kids. I wrote late at night after spending the day doing freelance business writing, and early in the morning before I had to take the kids to school. I wrote when I didn’t feel inspired and when I was convinced that what I was writing was total rubbish – and it probably was. But that rubbish helped me write better rubbish and eventually I wrote something good enough to get published.

And now, all these years and fifteen books later, I’m standing here giving a speech in the library where I worked on papers in high school and dreamed about being a writer. Thank you, thank you, from the bottom of my heart for giving me this honor. What I’m really looking forward to is the day in the future, when I’m in the audience listening to one of you giving this speech as the featured author. So make sure you get your butt in the chair and write that book.

The Bittersweetness of Honeycake

Every Rosh Hashanah, we could always count on Mom to make us all honey cake - and her honey cakes were delicious. Last year she sent some in a care package to my daughter, who had just started her freshman year at college and wasn't able to come home for the holidays.

It's almost six months since we lost Mom so suddenly and unexpectedly, and although we are carrying on, working, surviving, doing the things we need to do,  and trying every day to honor her memory, there is still such an enormous hole. As I told her when we were together at StoryCorps:   (see podcast episode 421, end "remembering Susan Silverstone Darer") "If our family is a wheel, you are the hub."

This weekend, it hit me all over again that Mom isn't here to make the honey cake. Like taking over the responsibility for hosting the seder, which made me feel like I really was a grown up who would never again sit at the kiddie table (the place from which I always wanted to be promoted and suddenly longed for again) it's time to make the honey cake. 

I knew I had the recipe somewhere, because I have made it one or two times before. After a bit of digging I found it, still on the fax roll (anyone remember thermal paper?) from when Mom faxed it to me in 1997, when my son was four and my daughter was one. Because it's on thermal paper, both the recipe and Mom's handwriting are fading. My written notes in pen are still clear, as I made my own marks on the recipe. 

The honey cake recipe - still on original  fax paper, which is now fading. 

And so we pass on the traditions from generation to generation: L'dor v'dor.  Someday, G-d willing,  I hope my children will make this honey cake for their children, and remember their grandmother as they eat it. And me, too, after I am gone. 

Wishing you all a L'Shanah Tovah - and may all the people of the world experience the sweet blessing of peace. 

In which I need to take some advice from my 25 year old self...

My mother kept everything, which means that going through her apartment is overwhelming, but also filled with gifts from the past. Yesterday, I found a set of CD's that were converted from tapes, which were converted from stenographs made by my late grandfather Murray, who worked with William Randoph Hearst, with United Artists, and was President of 20th Century Fox International. Grandpa died when I was 6, so my memories of him are mostly of him and Grandma taking me to FAO Schwartz (which itself is now going to be just a memory) to buy my first Barbie - who had red hair.
But thanks to this oft-converted technology, I'm now listening to my grandfather's voice (with his amazing New Yawk accent) telling stories about Alexander Korda, how Korda discovered Vivian Lee, Korda's relationship with Churchill, and all sorts of incredible stuff. And that's just halfway through disc one.

I also found a folder of letters I'd written to my parents in the late 80's, when I was working on Wall St and going to  NYU business school at night for my MBA. This letter was written when I was almost finished with the MBA, but clearly feeling the strain.

"I know that I'm working toward long term goals, but to tell you the truth, I'm sick of working towards long-term goals, I want start living my life, not just passing time till I get to some point in the future."

At this particular point in time, I really needed to read those words from my younger, and apparently wiser and more clearer thinking self. Fifty-two year old me is still equally as goal oriented, ambitious, and hard working. Some things never change. What has changed is that I'm now putting that ambition towards a career that I really love, the one that I wanted to have all along but was told would never make me any money. I love my work, and so I don't mind working the hours I do, because most of the time, it doesn't feel like work.

But this summer has been crazy stressful. It's the third summer in a row that I have not one, but two books due at the end of the summer. One is a revision that had to be put off because of Mom's unexpected passing, and I'm grateful for that delay, because there's no way I could have tackled it back in March/April. The other is a totally new work, which I'm super excited about, but we haven't officially announced yet.

This week, one of my really good friends, Maura Keaney, was visiting from Virginia with her young son, and she invited me to go to the beach with them. I haven't been to the beach in my town in over two years. Maybe three, because I've spent the summer on book deadlines. I call my mid-life crisis convertible "the beach" because running errands in it, or driving to teaching jobs is the only time I get sun. When she posted pictures from Island Beach, I regretted that I wasn't able to spend the time with them catching up and making sandcastles. I love making sandcastles. I miss having the time to make sandcastles.

But Mom's apartment isn't going to clear out itself. My books won't write themselves.  As Robert Frost said so beautifully in one of my favorite poems: "But I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep." 

Still, I am listening to 25 year old Sarah. If 27 years later, I still feel the same way, I think it's pretty important to take heed of her words. Mom's death taught me that we never know when the last day will come, and I don't want mine to come when I'm still waiting for that distant point in the future when I get to stop and smell the roses. Or make the time to meet with friends I really care about and build sandcastles with their children.

Mom's Words of Wisdom

When you're grieving, you never know what will trigger the next meltdown, that next wave of uncontrollable sobbing, the feeling that your heart is broken into so many tiny fragments that it cannot ever possibly be whole again.

This morning I wanted to be brave, because my mother had been taking a memoir class at the Ferguson Library in Stamford, and she'd been working hard to complete her recollections, focusing on the theme of strong women in our family. I found out from someone in her class who came to make a condolence call that the deadline is April 18th, and so I'm going to try to finish the job for her.  Her work was all laid out on the dining room table in her apartment, and we'd put it in an archive box.

I hadn't had the courage to start reading, but I knew I had to do it today.

And at the end of chapter two, I read this:

"Life is a patchwork quilt. Each piece of experience, whatever size or shape, is part of our whole being. Our friends and family, our children, and their children, our forbearers and those to come in the future, all enlarge the quilt. We are covered in their love. And our love covers them.

I learned from a woman who was a prisoner in Romania in solitary for several years. She said that experiences couldn't be taken away from her, as material things can. Throughout her incarceration and torture, she made her thoughts turn to experiences: trips she would retake in her mind, planning how she would decorate her new home if she got out. Give yourself and your family every experience, don't wish you had done something and put it off."


My mother was an amazing, strong woman. I miss her so much.

PS: I taught my youngest nephew "Carpe Diem" on Sunday. I told him it was the way smart people say "YOLO." Then I introduced him to my friend Irene, who grew up in Germany and is a Latin scholar, to make sure he said it correctly. So now he knows how to say it in both English and German learned Latin. CARPE DIEM, my friends. And sew your love into the patchwork quilt of humanity.

Eulogy for my mother, Susan S. Darer

Delivered at Temple Beth-El, Stamford, CT March 22nd, 2015

When you’re a teenager trying to assert your own identity, pretty much the last thing you want to hear is how much you look like your mother. But I heard it a lot, and in that funny way history has of repeating itself, my daughter Amie has heard it once or twice herself, much to her chagrin.

But standing here today, nothing makes me happier than knowing that I bear a strong resemblance to my mother.

Since Mom’s unexpected passing earlier this week, we’ve all been in shock. Every morning we wake up hoping that it was bad dream, only to be hit again with the painful understanding that living in a world without our beloved mother and grandmother is the dreadful new reality.

I make my living as a writer, but when I tried to begin penning this eulogy, I had a rare moment of writer’s block. Because how can mere words sum up Mom?

I first tried – and failed – to do this in the dedication of my book CHARMED, I’M SURE which comes out next spring. I’m so, so grateful that I gave Mom the manuscript to read on her recent trip to Israel, so that she knew about the dedication. It says: To my mother, Susan Darer, for teaching me to become the woman I am today.

But that short sentence doesn’t begin to do Mom justice.

Here’s where it helps to have friends who are bestselling authors, so you can crib the words and ideas that they write in in their condolence letters.

Cinda Williams Chima wrote this: “You look so much like her, and I’m sure that’s not her only legacy to you. So you can think of yourself as carrying your parents forward through the years.”

Reading Cinda’s words made me think about Mom’s greatest legacies to John, Anne and me - the ones we are endeavoring to carry forward.

The most important of these is family – not just us, not just our aunts and uncles and first cousins, but our great aunts and uncles, and our second and third cousins. Unfortunately our great aunts and uncles are no longer with us, but when we were growing up it was like having multiple sets of grandparents, dispensing love and wisdom and guidance. Family gatherings were big fun affairs, and if you married into the family you probably needed a scorecard to keep track.  But the second cousins we grew up are with are here today supporting us in love, and our kids are friends with their third cousins. That’s what we mean in Yiddish when we use the word mishpocheh.

But another legacy our mother left us is the knowledge that family members aren’t merely the people related to us by blood or marriage.  She modeled that we create family by caring about those around us. Seeing faces here from so many different time periods and facets of her life is a testament to that. As someone who is struggling to face the fact that she no longer has parents, I hope that I can look to you, the extended family Mom created, to continue to dispense the love, wisdom and guidance our mother is no longer here to give us.

For all of us who loved Mom, the shock of her sudden passing feels like having limbs torn off without anesthetic.  In recent years Mom hadn’t just been my parent, she’d become my friend. During challenging moments with my teenagers, I’d call her up and apologize time after time for everything I’d ever said and done to her when I was a teenager – and as everyone who knew me when I was in high school can attest, I had a LOT to apologize for. It got to the point that Mom gave me the Jewish equivalent of a Papal Indulgence – “Enough already, I forgive you once and for all!”

Mom with her granddog, Benny

We were able to have deeper conversations, about life and love, and even politics, a subject area where over the last decade of being a columnist I’ve developed a reputation for being rather outspoken. I know this made Mom proud, even though it sometimes caused her problems. For instance, there was the time someone who couldn’t get my unlisted phone number left her several vitriolic messages late at night, resulting in us having to file a complaint with the Stamford police.  I was beside myself because I’ve had to develop what it takes to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune but folks should know better than to mess with my mom.

Still, I was glad we’d started to have such conversations, because when I was growing up, politics was an area where my father’s voice overshadowed my mother’s.  

Beth Styles, to whom I’m so grateful for being here with Mom’s New World Chorus family today, wrote about how our mother returned the love she received from fellow choir members after Dad’s death by volunteering to be the leader of the Chorus’ care team. Beth wrote: “It was her desire that everyone in the choir felt known and acknowledged.” 

That really resonated with me, because my son Josh and I found out that we’d lost Mom when we’d just got off a plane on the way back from attending the TED conference in Vancouver after hearing Dave Isay of StoryCorps, winner of the 2015 TED Prize, announce his Wish for theWorld. 

StoryCorps is an oral history project that aims to provide people of all backgrounds with the opportunity to record and share their life stories in the belief that “every life matters equally and infinitely.”

Anne and I interviewed Dad for Father’s Day shortly after the first StoryCorps booth opened in Grand Central in 2003. It wasn’t long after that, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, so we’re so grateful to have that recording. In 2006, Josh and I went into the booth together, and as a result, ended up at the TED conference last week. In 2010, Mom and Dad were recorded at StoryCorps as part of the Alzheimer’s initiative, and later that year, I interviewed Mom. I’m so glad I didn’t wait.

To honor Mom’s memory please consider having a conversation of your own with someone you love. You no longer have to wait for an appointment at a StoryCorps booth – at TED, Dave announced a new StoryCorp app, which helps you with questions and gives helpful hints on how to record a meaningful interview. It then allows you to upload your recording to the Library of Congress.

 Don’t put it off, because as I learned so painfully this week, you don’t know when you’ll kiss your mother goodnight after spending a great evening together and say: “See you when I get back, I love you,” only to return to find out that you won’t see her again, ever.

Mom touched so many lives in a positive way. In an age where society too often focuses attention on the loudest, the flashiest and the wealthiest, she was a quiet, humble hero. She was my hero. My greatest hope is that I will live the rest of my life in a way that is truly worthy of the example she set.