HEY! Now, it's a contest with prizes and everything....See Joshilyn's comment in the comment section. And then click on her site tomorrow.....!!!

Joshilyn Jackson's Mysterious Affair

By Sarah - And Joshilyn

Joshilyn Jackson is quickly becoming the go-to girl of Southern writing. Her two previous books - Gods in Alabama (which begins with the best opening line ever*) and Between, Georgia - have been #1 Booksense picks. Her latest, The Girl Who Stopped Swimming, in which a happily domesticated suburban quilter is visited by the ghost of a girl who turns up dead in her swimming pool, is that rare combination of page turner mystery and literary novel peppered with characters who leap off the page - Jackson's trademark.

Before we get to her post below, however, I'd just like to note a few of her responses to my nosy questions: Jackson does not believe in ghosts; she believes in physics.

"That said, I have been places that felt haunted, and even physics believes that no energy is ever lost," she said. "Energy just changes form. So. There are more things in heaven and earth, etc. etc."

As for the Southern suburban existence she brings so vividly to life in The Girl Who Stopped Swimming, Jackson knows it well having lived in a suburb of Atlanta that was once "in the cotton" and is now being gobbled up by the usual accoutrement of more comfortable living - box stores, Chili's restaurants, malls. In her latest book, Jackson sets up two parallel universes - the suburb Victorianna and the old mining town DeLop - that are more haunting than the ghosts. DO NOT MISS THIS NOVEL!!

And now for Jackson's blog:

The Mysterious Affair of the Bicycle

Since February 28^th, I have been on tour for The Girl Who Stopped Swimming and today is the tail end of a 40 hour break at home before I head up to do the east coast. Last night I was SO happy to be in my own personal bed with own personal husband with my own personal cats tucking themselves in around the edges that I slept for twelve straight hours straight, and yet, even while entirely unconscious, I could not quite stop mulling over The Mysterious Affair of the Bicycle in my dreams.

Let me present the facts of the case to you:

While signing at a west coast bookshop, far from home, the Event Co-coordinator brought me a slip of paper and said, “You had a phone message earlier, and Kate, the manager, wrote it down for you.” The slip of paper said:

“Todd for Joshilyn Jackson: Bicycle of hers was left in his garage. Please tactfully pass this message on to the author.”

CRYPTIC! I do not own a bicycle! I do not know a Todd! And why would this message need to be passed on to me in a TACTFUL manner? It doesn’t sound PERSONAL or EMBARRASSING? Unless we assume it is a EUPHEMISM. It sounds like one, doesn’t it? If I were a man, and somewhat sexually indiscriminant, and if the message was from, say a “Toddina,” I would assume I had gotten someone pregnant.

This must be some former Todd? Some long forgotten bicycle? And yet, I can only dredge up two past Todds of any note, and they are so far back in the misty past that I can remember NEITHER’s last name.

1) Cupcake Todd. This Todd was circa fourth grade, and he was my first love. Well, he was my first REAL LIFE love. Before him I had crushes on Spock (Yes. That Spock. Pointy ears and all.) and Lurch (the Adams Family’s groaning butler) and the constellation Orion (I know, that one is especially weird, but, come ON! He fought BEARS!!!) My type was apparently Tall, Dark, and Totally Emotionally Unavailable, so it surprised no one more than me that when at last I fell for a Real Alive Boy, he should be a sunny dispositioned, white-blonde object, two inches shorter than me with a face as round and smooth and white as a Vidalia onion.

I expressed the depths of my Todd-ian adoration every day at lunch by taking ONE of my hostess cupcakes and kissing it surreptitiously. Then I would offer the kissed cake to Todd, and I would pretend to be very busy and important as I peeped sideways in little sipping glances to watch him eat my kiss. For the record, let me assure you it was a blameless kiss, close-lipped and chaste, and yet it was as fervent as possible for a girl who had not yet even HEARD of how they bussed their flaky pastries in the wilds of debauched France.

Within ten days, rumors of my secret dessert-kissing went from best friend Yvonne down a long chain of other girls, until a vicious little hussy named Lisa (who liked Todd herself) TOLD him what I had been doing, and then it worked its way back up the chain and right before lunch, Yvonne told me in hushed tones that TODD KNEW. (!!!!!)

That day, terrified but too in love to quail, I kissed the cupcake and proffered it as usual, and Todd took it and ate it as usual, which was to me and my gaggle of friends and the bitterly disappointed Lisa proof positive of his reciprocal devotion to me. In retrospect, it occurs that he may have only been expressing a devotion for cream filling, but at the time, the general assumption was that Todd and I were “going together.”

I did have a bicycle in those days, a pink one with streamers on the handlebars, and I may very well have left it in Todd’s garage a few times. And yet I can’t imagine he would search me out at a bookstore in California and ask a manager to TACTFULLY tell me so via phone message, lo these thirty years and change later.

2) Beautiful Gay Todd.

He was from my last college days,and he was MASTER of the bon mot. I LOVED talking to him. My relationship with Beautiful Gay Todd mostly consisted of running into him at parties and spending an hour gabbing with him and laughing ourselves sick, and then we would circulate onwards. For the rest of the night, I had to tell about 50 single girls who had seen me talking to him and wanted an intro that he was gay, and then they would sigh and say, “Oh. What a pity,” and if my friend Steven was near enough he would pop into the conversation juuuuust long enough to say, “Well *I* don’t think so,” and waggle his eyebrows.

I have no memory of any doings with Beautiful Gay Todd beyond these and certainly no memories of him having a garage or me having a bicycle that I would have put in it and abandoned.

The Abandoned Bicycle remains a mystery wrapped in an enigma served with conundrum sauce, and I keep waiting for something to happen to clarify it all, and the something keeps not happening. This is VERY unsatisfying, but, to bright-side here, it’s one of those little niggling things that keeps intruding into my imagination. I find myself making UP plausible Todds, plausible bicycles, plausible reasons for TACT.

I strongly suspect that unless an explanation is offered, in about ten or so years of mulling, I will have the makings of another novel, in much the same way that six enigmatic sentences in a short story started Gods in Alabama, nine years before I wrote it. It was an inexplicable piece of graffiti that started Between, Georgia, a good eighteen years before I wrote THAT. THE GIRL WHO STOPPED SWIMMING began seven years before I wrote it, when I saw a particular quilt by fabric artist Pamela Allen, and started trying to imagine the sort of mind that would need to take quilting—a traditional cozy big-bosomed Amishy female mother thing---and turn it into an edgy statement about women’s roles without EVER losing a sense of humor.

Of course I want to know, WHAT BICYCLE??? WHAT DAMN TODD? But at the same time, the writer in me hopes I never find out.

Joshilyn

*As for that best opening line, ever? "There are gods in Alabama: Jack Daniel's, high school quarterbacks, trucks, big tits and also Jesus."

Comments

[Nancy martin]

Hey! I just noticed that THE GIRL WHO STOPPED SWIMMING in #7 on this week's San Fran. Chronicle bestseller list!! Woohoo! A real bestseller here at TLC! Many congratz!

[Nancy martin]

IS. is #7 on the bestseller list! Yeesh.

[SarahS]

Must be Todd's doing....

[Joshilyn]

Whee -- and it hit the B and N Chart this week at 30! That's two lists I have never hit before :) WHEEE! Thank you for noticing.

Joshilyn

[Kathy Reschini Sweeney]

Does Lisa Loopner know you're chasing her boyfriend Todd DiLamuca? Because she is too smart a cookie to fall for the anonymous note excuse.

[Josh]

You know, Lisa Loopner never really "did it" for me. I was much more of a Emily Litella guy--her, I quote all the time. "What's all this talk about violins on television?"

[Pam aka SisterZip]

Nope, Roseanne Rosannadana for me.

I'm depressed
I've gained weight
My face broke out
I'm nauseous,
I'm constipated
My feet are swollen
My gums are bleeding
My sinuses are clogged
I have heartburn
I'm cranky
And I've got gas.

[Rita Scott]

Oh boy! Quilts & ghosts, right up my alley!
I think Todd is probably the 4th grader. When searching for the old crowd for a reunion, I found my first boyfriend and gave him a cryptic call. LOL his misspent youth coming back to haunt him!

[SarahS]

Lisa Loopner. Roseanne Rosannadana. Emily Litella. What a literate bunch we are. And, besides, what's the big deal about "youth in Asia?"

[Kathy Reschini Sweeney]

"What's all this fuss about Soviet Jewelry?"

That one still makes me laugh.

Maybe Todd is really Mr. Richard Feder from Ft. Lee, New Jersey.

But my all time favorite was Judy Miller - the hyperactive kid in the Brownie/Girl Scout uniform who put on shows in her bedroom.

[Becky Hutchison]

How can those little crustaceans hide all those big guns in their little shells? (Croatians, Emily, Croatians)

Sarah, it's sad but true. I have a close friend who was a philosophy major in college. She asked if I wanted to go to a talk on euthanasia. Coming from an anthropology major, I really did think she was saying Youth in Asia. I figured it out MAYBE by the first half hour...I was just too pitiful. My friend still thinks it's funny...after almost 25 years. ;-)

[Caryn]

I'm with you, Joshilyn--sometimes I would like to have all the mysteries in the universe solved but, really, life is more fun when there are a few unanswered questions about. Gives us more to think about.

[Mary Storyteller]

My birthday is October 5th and I started first grade at age 5, so was always younger than everyone else.
Karen, me too -- kindergarten at age 4, first grade at age 5 --
These similarities are just too spooky.

Wireless catalog had a t-shirt "Visualize Whirled Peas" which I just didn't understand, until they came out with "End the Violins."

[Mary Storyteller]

"My birthday is October 5th and I started first grade at age 5, so was always younger than everyone else."
Karen, me too -- kindergarten at age 4, first grade at age 5 --
These similarities are just too spooky.

Wireless catalog had a t-shirt "Visualize Whirled Peas" which I just didn't understand, until they came out with "End the Violins."

BTW, I told stories at the City Museum today. It was great fun!

[Vickirr]

Obviously little hussy Lisa has grown up! For lo these many years, she has waited to "get" you and now she finally has .....