Listen Here: Discussing the spooky art of ghostwriting on @RNZNights in New Zealand

Last night I enjoyed the best interview I've ever had on the topic of ghostwriting. Bryan Crump of Radio New Zealand National invited me to chat it up, and he came to the conversation with an open mind and intelligent questions. We talked more about the craft than we did about what celebrities I've worked with, and that's pretty unusual.

Listen here.

#BookClubBesties Part Swan, Part Goose is out in paperback!

Swoosie Kurtz's memoir Part Swan, Part Goose is out in paperback this week, and I'm lobbying book clubs to read it. We Baby Boomers need to talk about how we relate to our aging parents, and Swoosie did that with huge heart, soul and wit in this book, candidly discussing things that have gone wrong and what she and her mom have gotten enormously right.

Swoosie has been a Broadway icon since the 1970s--a Tony, Emmy and Obie winner--and a lot of people love her from the family television drama Sisters in the early 1990s. These days Swoosie's slaying audiences weekly as Melissa McCarthy's mom on Mike & Molly, and she talks about all that in this book, but her main gig is caring for her 99 year old mom, author Margo Kurtz, and that's the heart of the story.

Margo is a stitch and a poet, still tenacious and vivacious, but living in a world of her own. Getting to know her was one of the great perks of working with Swoosie on this memoir. Swoosie was on a mission to breathe new life into Margo's memoir, My Rival, the Sky, published by Putnam in 1945 and rereleased as an ebook by Perigee last year.

Swoosie and I wove excerpts from Margo's book throughout Part Swan, Part Goose, so readers get to know Margo up close and experience some of her life with Swoosie's larger than life father, Col. Frank Kurtz, the most decorated fighter pilot of WWII. What emerges is the story of an extraordinary family and how they formed a fortress of love and support around each other in the best and worst of times.

I'm incredibly proud of what Swoosie accomplished here and thrilled that I got to help her. This book was a gift in my life as I cared for my mom, who was dying of Alzheimer's while Swoosie and I were working together. I think it'll be a gift to a lot of people. But (as they say on Reading Rainbow) you don't have to take my word for it!

“Part Swan, Part Goose is a brave and riveting book about family, fame, theater and life. It is witty, wise and irresistible. I loved it." —Tom Brokaw

"...spontaneous, irreverent but always kind, independent yet deeply rooted to her family. Swoosie has put her heart and her humor into these pages.” —Melissa McCarthy

“I laughed and cried (sometimes at the same time) reading this extraordinary story... Her observations about love and loss had me dog-earing several pages to re-read again and again.” —Carol Burnett

"...a remarkable journal about Kurtz’s extremely close relationship with her parents...a compelling saga about her recent journey as a loving caregiver for her mother as she’s slipped into depths of dementia." —Chicago Sun Times

“I thought I’d browse (Part Swan, Part Goose) and write a quick column. I couldn’t browse. Swoosie kept dragging me in with another anecdote, and she writes in a freewheeling style... yet it all makes perfect sense. The piece of her heart left on the pages is impossible not to love.” —Bob Fischbach, Omaha World-Herald

“Part Swan, Part Goose: An Uncommon Memoir of Womanhood, Work and Family is indeed uncommon. Unlike some show business memoirs, it’s neither a scandalous tell-all, nor an exercise in self-aggrandizement. Instead, it’s a candid, engaging look at Kurtz’s life and work, and especially her relationship with the two most important people in her life: her parents, Frank and Margo Kurtz.” —Trudy Ring, SheWired

“Filled with entertaining stories, gut-wrenching experiences, and touching memories, actress Swoosie Kurtz’ thoughtful memoir, Part Swan, Part Goose, celebrates her loving parents while documenting the formative events that shaped her stellar acting career.” —Tolucan Times

“Don't miss this book of collected praise for parents who had it all together. ...There is not a saccharine note in this delightful memoir.” —Liz Smith

LA agenda

Jerusha and I flew to Los Angeles yesterday to meet my current memoir guru client for an important phase in her project. The three of us will sit down for a few days, and Jerusha will read the entire manuscript out loud while my client and I follow along and take notes. We'll be finding out what pops and what flops and getting a sense of how this book will sound in a readers head.

Jerusha and I were driving to our hotel from LAX, following the directions of the GPS unit we've named A.J. Hep-G (long story), when we came to a roadblock. The first thing that grabbed my eye on the other side of the orange sawhorses was a huge black sign with white lettering: GOD ABHORS YOU. ("Geez," I said to Jerusha. "Welcome to LA.") We'd stumbled onto the LA Pride parade route, and things were just getting underway. As we tried to make our way around the massive gathering (we later heard estimates of 5-600,000 people -- we saw cheerleaders with beards, lots of leather, some seriously big hair, and a whole lot of celebration goin' on, as the song says.

The gay civil rights movement is something I've only just started learning about, and it's pretty interesting. The annual parade commemorates an event that happened in June, 1969 at the Stonewall Bar on Christopher Street in New York.

From John Cloud's article in Time Magazine:

It was 1:20 a.m. when eight cops stomped into the Stonewall Inn, a dive in Manhattan's Greenwich Village district that had no liquor license but served watery drinks to a mix of drag queens, street kids, gay professionals and closeted and straight mafiosi (who ran the place). Within two hours, the Village was bleeding and burning as hundreds rioted...

Prior to the Stonewall riots, raids on gay bars were a regular (and brutal) thing. A variety of factors made it easy to extort from and victimize this particular clientele.

From the Stonewall Place web site:

Instead of quietly slipping away into the night, as we had done for years, hustlers, drag queens, students and other patrons held their ground and fought back. Someone uprooted a parking meter and used it to barricade the door. The agents and police were trapped inside, They wrecked the place and called in reinforcements. Their vehicles raced to the scene with lights glaring and sirens blaring. The crowd grew. Someone set a fire. More people came. For three days, people protested. And for the first time, after innumerable years of oppression, the chant, Gay Power, rang out.

Other than that small knot of protesters by the sawhorses, I saw no sign of hatred or strife and plenty of evidence of God's love. It took us 90 minutes to work our way two miles to the hotel. During all that time, the only thing I saw that disgusted me was that black sign with it's ugly white lie.

Visit the Los Angeles Pride web site to read more about the history of Christopher Street West and learn about the true gay agenda, which is really just the human agenda: love, equality, and pride.