The tiger who should come to tea.

•March 14, 2009 • 4 Comments

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Today, I (well, my Granny and my book, really) was the subject of a big, front-page piece in the Guardian’s family pages. It’s a section I read, and know well – and I was interviewed by one of the best-known and potentially fiercest ladies in the business, Zoe Williams. (I mean this as a compliment, as a certain ruthlessness is kind of part of the job requirements. Nobody employs or wants to read ‘nice’ journos.) So, having sat through an almost 2-hour grilling about my book, my politics, my childhood and my parenting advice, I was understandably nervous all week about what Ms Williams would write – would she slag me off for being a pretty young Mum who writes pretty books about raising kids pretty well? Or would she see beyond the required fluff of my cross-stitch, pink and green book covers, the whole infuriating Yummy Mummy issue, my big blue eyes and bright ‘please don’t crucify me!’ smile, and try to actually understand who I am, and what my books seek to achieve?
I shouldn’t have worried, because in the event she wrote one of the most complimentary and understanding pieces about me and my work I have ever read, and all credit to her for taking the time to actually bother to do so, and to keep an open mind.
As she put it herself: “I had decided beforehand not to like her, and then I liked her.”

It’s a strange thing, being in the public eye, in however tiny, barely-noticeable a way. People feel they have the automatic right to comment on you – not on your work, which is fair game because work is put out there to be criticised fairly, but on YOU. You the person, as opposed to you the author/actress/presenter/artist/director or whatever it is you happen to be to get yourself in the position of ‘person in the public eye’. And comment they do – most often not very kindly. (Some of the comments that have already appeared on the Guardian page beneath the article illustrate this pretty well. Some are fair, and contribute something interesting. Others are downright nasty and pointless.)
It seems to be the rule that if you like something you just like it and maybe tell someone you like about it the next day in the queue at Tescos, but if you hate it you write about it online immediately for all to hate with you.
Nasty, personal comments on your lifestyle, your hair, the way you walk, or talk, or smile are commonplace on web chatrooms, and the truth is that, to the sub ject, they really do do hurt. 

One reason for this is free-for-all, public, on-line flogging is jealousy (she’s written a book and looks half decent too. I hate her); another is boredom (nothing to do? Hey, slag someone off!); and yet another is because it’s so damned easy, and also, making a caustic remark about someone you don’t know but have read something about is a lot easier than taking the time to understand what they do, for yourself. And there’s the problem: about someone you have read something about. Not met for youself, or bothered to see their film/read their book/listen to their music and form an unbiased opinion. Read about. In someone else’s words….Which brings me (almost, ahem) seamlessly back to the journalists.

Journalists, like all the rest of us, have a job to do. They have to earn money, which means they have to get published. And it’s a lot easier to get published if you say somthing a little more scintillating than “I met this really nice author today, who was really sweet and lovely. And she’s written a lovely book. Which I haven’t read, but I’m sure you’d like. Because it looks so lovely.” Much better is to claw your subject to pieces using an armoury of character-busting adjectives, adverbs and telling details about what sort of mood they were in, if they arrived late, what a bizarre chin they have, how skinny/fat/heathy/pale etc they are or if they ate with their mouth full.
That sells copy.
I don’t criticise journalists for painting a dramatic, colouful picture of events, for exactly this reason. But I do mind – a LOT – when they describe something they just haven’t seen at all, or which influences the reader’s opinion hugely, simply because it makes a dull story better. Why write, ‘Liz entered the room and shook my hand’ when you could instead write, as happened to me once a few years ago (I forget the exact words but this is pretty much them) , ’Liz breezed across the lobby, designer glasses in her glossy hair, skinny jeans beneath and expensive-looking denim jacket and a mega-watt, perfect smile.’
The first is factually correct. The second is a slanted, catty embellishment, written because he or she wants to portray me as a stuck-up, glamorous ‘Yummy Mummy’ ,as they perceive the term, with pots of money and manicurist. It’s not actually incorrect (I do often have glasses in my hair to keep the darned stuff out of my eyes!) but it’s not necessary to the story, and it clouds thre reader’s judgement.
I’ve been on the receiving end of this kind of nonsense a fair few times, and I’ve learned to laugh it off. (Mostly!) But it’s a real pleasure to read an article written by somebody with enough intelligence and care for her work that she can admit when her preconceptions were competely wrong, and who can say
 ’Fraser totally turned me around….Talking to [her] has unsettled, even destroyed, my understanding of the cultural trope.’ 
Who can admit that she hadn’t read any of my books before meeting me, (one does wonder though, why a leading national newspaper assigns the job of interviewing an author whose books the journo knows nothing about other than what she’s read from other, err, other journos, and whose subject  – parenting – she has so very, very little experience of, but that’s for another blog…) and who can learn something new about being a parent, have their eyes opened to a new idea and do so while keeping her own ideas in tact. Oh, and have the sense to realise that not turning into the back end of a bus after having a baby is not the worst thing a woman can ever do, and doesn’t automatically mean she should be chastised for it!
Reporting the truth, especially if it’s not what you wanted to find, takes courage, and shows a genuine interest in your subject.
I was proved wrong too: I didn’t want to dislike Zoe at all, but I expected her to be pretty tough going, and not my cup of tea at all. Tough she certainly was, but also funny, and human, and beneath the Rottweiler exterior (which melted into an almost cute puppy at times) I found someone I wouldn’t actually mind spending a good deal more time with, and wished I could have met under different circumstances.
She was doing her job, and so was I.
And, though she’d deny this I’m sure, she has many of the hallmarks of Yummy Mummy-dom herself: she is undoubtedly attractive, very intelligent, she works hard, exercises (she arrived on a bike – good on her!), admits her failings on the parenting front and is just doing the best she can for her child, while keeping the ‘pre-maternity Zoe’ alive. That, my friends, is a Yummy Mummy.

Ms Williams for your honesty, wit, brains and ability to see deeper than my foundation, I salute you! If you keep this up I think you’ll make a very good Mum indeed.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/mar/14/best-child-rearing-techniques

Easter gone mad.

•March 13, 2009 • 1 Comment

phoebe eating chocolate!

OK, so this is a very “Oh, what is the world coming to?” posting, but when you read it you’ll see why.
Below is what appears on a letter brought home from school by my lovely children today. Before you read, please head this warning: you may find yourself crying, tearing your hair out or using such unattractive phrases as ‘political correctness gone mad!’ and ‘in my day….’. Hopefully you will, like me, only laugh at the sheer idiocy of it, but truly, it is no laughing matter, as we shall come to shortly.
Here goes, and I quote:

“This year we have decided to hold an Easter egg hunt for all children to participate in.” So far so good and Eastery. And fun. It goes on…
“We appreciate that there may be come concerns regarding children given chocolate during school time without supervision and agreement of parents.” Ummm, well, not really, but anyway. Go on.
“We will, therefore, be giving children tokens,” tokens??, “after they have completed the hunt and, at the end of the school day, the children can come with their parents, select their chocolate egg outside their classroom and pay 50p.”
Whaaaaat???!!

So, let me get this straight: you want a bunch of excited, chocolate-hungry kids aged between 5 and 11 to run about the school grounds excitedly finding as many eggs (gluten and nut-free ,of course. mmmmm…) as they can, and then you plan to take them all AWAY from the children and put these gluten and nut-free oefs in a big box till after school when Mummy gets dragged to the school office, cash in hand, to BUY an egg for each of her kids. And ONE each – are you kidding me?
I have just written a book about the sad loss of childhood in the UK today and how to put it back again, (in case you missed it somehow it’s called A Spoonful of Sugar, and it’s out now!) and it’s my great regret that I didn’t have this pathetic letter to hand while I wrote it, as I don’t think I could have found a better way of illustrating the problem.

Kids LIKE chocolate! They like finding it, and, believe it or not, they also like eating it. Lots of it. Yes, it’s bad for their teeth and their waist-lines – but it’s also bloody good FUN, and that’s what is so woefully, miserably, desperately and dangerously missing in this country. Next thing you know they’ll be banned from playing on the climbing frame before school in case anyone hurts themselves- oh hang on, that’s been banned already. OK then, they won’t be allowed a plaster if they cut their knee, in case they are allergic to it – oooops, no, that one’s been taken as well.

Seriously though, the more we deny kids all the things they need to experience as kids – like falling down and getting hurt, being told off when they are downright rude, being allowed to walk all the way to the end of the road without a police escort or eating too much chocolate once in a while on a special day - the more damage we do them because they have no sense of what the real world is really like, and they can’t have the fun and the freedom they need to have.

They are CHILDREN. Let them have a proper childhood and do childish things!

My children will be doing an Easter egg hunt this year, and they can eat as many of the chocolate lovelies as they darned well like. Otherwise, what’s the world coming to, eh?

The best laid plans…

•March 12, 2009 • 1 Comment

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Family life is nothing if not changeable. What looks a dead cert at 9am on Moday is cancelled/delayed/forgotten about by midday, and plans – even the best laid ones – gang aglay faster than my allegedly waterproof marcara dribbles its black way down my cheeks every time I brave the local swimming pool.
My strategy for getting by without losing every single hair on my head (though the grey ones could happily go, if they want to….) is to make very, very rough plans, and then be prepared to change them ooooooh, about every two hours, at the present rate.
A case in point is the looming Easter holidays. There are people out there, I’ve heard, who plan, book and organise their holidays not weeks but months, and even in some serious cases YEARS,  in advance. I am not sniffy about these people at all – I am in awe of their organisational skills. But when I even attempt such impressive forward-planning and then throw 3 kids, 2 jobs, 1 husband, no dog but a small and needy hamster into the mix I get what could safely be described as a complete cock-up.
Here’s my latest one: we had planned to go to Scotland for the first week of the Easter hols this year. The accommodation is booked, Granny is beside herself with excitement and we are counting down the days. And then what happens yesterday? My daughter announces that her dancing competition final (for which she has been training twice a week before school for 3 months, and her excitement about it is now reaching fever pitch – ie we are NOT going to miss it!!) is on the day we are due to leave, I am given an important  hospital appointment slap bang in the middle of our planned week away and a job I’ve been waiting for for months crops up for that week as well!
And so we do what all families do in such hectic circumstances: we cancel all plans, and hope to go away the week after.

Families eh – never a dull moment! 

A SPOONFUL OF SUGAR is in the shops NOW -perfect for Mums, Grannies, Dads and friends.

An exciting day!

•March 9, 2009 • Leave a Comment

spoonful-of-sugar-cover-smallerMy third book was published today!! This is the glorious moment that all we writers hope and hope will happen to us. A book. On a shelf. In a bookshop. With our name on it. That someone will buy, and read and enjoy! (Obviously that last bit is rarely confirmed, unless someone is kind enough to say so on an online review page. But I do hope people will enjoy it!)
                             The life of a writer can be a very strange one indeed: we are often to be found sitting alone in a room, hunched over a laptop typing away for day after day, week after week, month and month and even year after year, all the while hoping that some of what we’re conjuring up in our befuddled, over-caffeinated brains makes sense to anyone else out there. And then, one brilliant, happy, wonderful day, something happens that makes all the deleting, swearing, sweating, cursing and crying worthwhile: we see our book in a BOOK SHOP!!!! This is exactly what happened to me today when I walked nervously into my local branch of Waterstone’s and Borders, hoping to glimpse  a cover or two (hell, or three or more!) of my latest book, A Spoonful of Sugar. And there it was!!! At such moments the desire to rush across the shop floor, kiss said books and fall the floor crying clutching a handful of the beauties is pretty overwhelming, and but thanks to a radio interview I was dangerously close to being late for, I merely managed a small skip and a jump, a cheesy grin, and I was out of there again.
                                 If you want to join me in my little celebration – and find out how to give your kids a proper childhood while you’re at it – then you can do so by visiting any branch of the aforementioned book shops, as well as Tesco, Sainsburys and of course going onto Amazon, and purchasing your very own copy of the magnificent A Spoonful of Sugar – Old-fashioned Wisdom for Modern-day Mothers. Quite simply the most important book about childhood and parenting to be written for a very, very, VERY long time! Enjoy.
Liz x

Starting Out. « Lizfraser’s Weblog

•April 16, 2008 • 1 Comment