Response to "Miss New York Has Everything"

I'm starting to feel like a star-f*cker after my continual mention of the fact that I know Lori, but it has been interesting to re-read a book now that I know the author. It gives me a perspective that I've never had before--to be able to read a text but also have knowledge of the person who created the text, to know what she is like in conversation, to know what was not mentioned in the memoir. The first time I read Miss NY I had not met Lori. I finished the book an hour before my boyfriend Erik (who went to high school with Lori's husband) and I went to their house for dinner. Lori, her husband Dave, and their two children live in Lori's childhood home in Trafford.

I wandered through the little ranch house and felt like I was touring a celebrity home, or Emily's Dickinson's Amherst homestead. I had finished the book so recently that it was fascinating to be in the place where most of the book took place. And to see the transformation that the house has taken on. Lori speaks of the house as a typical Pittsburgh suburban ranch house with no privacy in a nice neighborhood, but the house has been remodeled to include offices for both Lori and Dave, who are both writers. I am fascinated and inspired by Lori's ability to quite literally go back to her roots while at the same time making the space, and the town, her own.

Lori's writing is hilarious--last week I stole my favorite line, in which she speaks of sitting on Santa's lap as a Junior Miss contestant and in the pictures looking, "fat and insane." The producer who worked on my last album is making a video of one of my songs. He lives far away so I've been given the task of filming myself for the project. I have yet to capture a moment in which I don't look like an idiot, or like I weigh 200 pounds. Last week I asked for patience from the producer of the video, noting that I was working hard to capture footage in which I did not look "fat and insane."

As I understand it, Lori has written a sequel to Miss NY, a sequel that documents her relationship with her husband (a fabulous husband who is certainly worth wading through the awful boyfriends she mentions in Miss NY).

Questions I have for Lori are--she has a great David Sedaris-like ability to discern which moments should be funny, and which should not. How does she do this? I've felt inspired to write something funny.

Also, she has a talent for beginning with a point/anecdote and then riffing off of the story with other semi-related stories but never straying from the initial point of the chapter in a distracting way. This is the way that I think--a former boyfriend called my mode of thinking "pinball-esque." I'd like to write in the manner that I really do think.

And, I'm not sure that the story is really about the desire to "make it big" or the experience of being a flight attendant. I'm wondering if these foci were emphasized for the purpose of publication. The book was promoted as chick lit, but it has more in common with Sex, Drugs & Cocoa Puffs than anything else.