Dear Friends, I want to get the business part of this letter out of the way right at the get go, by telling you the good news that the paperback edition of my novel, Labor Day, is set for publication August 3. My brand new novel, The Good Daughters, will be released just a few weeks later, on August 24. Also due in August: the paperback edition of my memoir, At Home in the World, with a new forward by me. I feel really proud of all three of these books. Of course, I’m hoping you’ll pre-order one or more of these books now, and that once my schedule of appearances is set, you’ll join me if I’m traveling to your area. Meanwhile, though--because I think of the recipients of this letter as my extended community of friends--I thought I’d catch you up a little on what’s been going on, beyond my career. It’s been a while since you heard from me, and if you’ve been following these letters of mine, you probably guessed the reason. Back in late January, I came home from Ethiopia with my two newly-adopted daughters, Almaz and Birtukan, ages 11 and 7. I’ve spent the last six months helping them adjust to their new lives in the United States--new language, culture, school, and, of course, a whole new family. And, as you might imagine of a woman whose last biological child left home nine years ago (and one who’d gotten pretty accustomed to her freedom), I’ve been doing a fair bit of adjusting myself. This has been one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life. Also, I think--with the exception of the season, twenty years ago, when my mother died and my marriage ended, all within the same month--it has been the hardest. The girls landed in San Francisco knowing about ten words of English, never having seen the ocean, entered a supermarket or eaten a strawberry. You could probably have counted on one hand the number of times they’d ridden in a car before we met. Because our home is very small, I had made a tiny bedroom for the girls out of my old front hall, with just barely enough room for a single bed, which is where they slept, wrapped in each others’ arms, until the big day when we brought in bunk beds. Since then, they’ve been enrolled in school (kindergarten for Birtukan, fourth grade for Almaz--a hugely challenging and frequently discouraging experience for a girl still learning the alphabet). Because it seemed important to balance the frustrations of language and schoolwork with something physical--an activity where words weren’t so necessary--one of the first things I did was to buy the girls a couple of nice used bikes, a soccer ball, and jump ropes. We started swimming lessons and Tae Kwon Do and hip hop class. On any given Sunday morning this past spring you would have found me on a flat path we found near my friend Cathryn’s house, a few miles from our very hilly home, running alongside two brave new riders, calling out “Pedal fast”--and sometimes lying on the grass beside them catching my breath. Same thing I was doing about twenty five years ago, actually. But the difference between age 31 and age 56 is substantial. How can I begin to catalogue all the new experiences we’ve shared over these last six months and the issues we’ve struggled over—language, food, customs, skin color and race, immunizations, weather, hair care? My daughters came to this new life without a knowledge of geography, mathematics, history, or the simple rules of science. A visit to the Museum of Natural History in New York, where they saw a diorama of early man, stunned them. After the first time I showed them pictures of dinosaurs, they wanted to know if we could go see some. It was news to them that dinosaurs were extinct. Well, the whole concept of extinction was news. That, and gravity, and photosynthesis, and the fact that there are one hundred pennies in a dollar. And a few billion more concepts along those lines. Even more than the educational and physical challenges have been the emotional ones--the daily, almost minute-by-minute struggles to establish trust, to communicate, and to navigate the vast gulf between the world my girls have known and the one into which they’re learning to integrate themselves. My daughters had lived through virtually constant hunger and deprivation, the death of their mother and the illness of their father. In Addis Ababba, I watched them say goodbye to their three beloved brothers, only a few years older than they are, who cared for them for much of their lives, and to an orphanage filled with children they love, who may never find a home themselves. They had known me exactly a week when we boarded that plane for the twenty-six hour ride home. And still, they held my hands tightly and trusted that they would be OK in my care. I will do everything I can to reaffirm that their faith in me is well founded. In March, Almaz put on a pioneer outfit and (with no idea what a pioneer was, or a covered wagon, or the state of California for that matter) joined her fourth grade class on a field trip to Sutter’s Fort to learn about the Donner Party. Birtukan learned the words to “The Garden Song” (inch by inch, row by row, going to make this garden grow) and planted radishes. Almaz earned her yellow belt in Tae Kwon Do. Birtukan discovered the running track out behind the high school in our town, and slipped on her sneakers every morning before school to run the loop, challenging whatever joggers we might find there to race with her. Sometimes she comes close to beating runners twice her size. Though there is one challenger who always gives her a run for her money, even barefoot: her sister. We went to the ballet--where Almaz sat transfixed--and to an Arlo Guthrie concert (where Arlo sang “This Land is Your Land” and Birtukan mouthed the words along with him) and to a Salmon Release day, and hiking in Point Reyes, and to a production of “Guys and Dolls” on the top of Mt. Tamalpais (where Birtukan was disappointed not to find real dolls). Almaz got up on stage--alone--at her school variety show and danced, to the cheers of classmates, to a song recorded by her new brother Charlie’s band, The Beatards. We made friends with a Haitian woman who braided their hair (and--because the process takes around five hours--taught me a lesson in patience.) We ran a lemonade stand to raise money to buy shoes for the girls’ old orphanage, and we watched movies (Charlie Chaplin first, then Cinderella, The Wiz, and The Thief of Bagdad, Parent Trap –both versions--and Singing in the Rain. Also--I’ll be honest here--Hannah Montana.) On my better days, I sit and watch the movies with Almaz and Birtukan, so we can talk about what‘s going on. One day I rented an Australian film I love, Rabbit Proof Fence--the true story of two aboriginal girls, taken from their mothers and locked up in a children’s work camp, who escape and make their way back home together--closely pursued by a team of men, across 1,200 miles of brutal, uninhabited terrain. Birtukan stood up from our cozy spot on the pillows for that one and called out, to the smallest character on the screen: “Run, Gracie, run!” There are some things I do not have to explain to these daughters of mine--and loss of home, loss of a mother, and the bonds of sisterhood are three of those things. They are wonderful, open, affectionate and friendly girls, and wherever we have gone these past months, the girls have made friends: with Saru, who gives them bowls of garbanzo beans from her Punjabi restaurant, and our neighbors Bobbi and Thomas who play soccer with us, and Tony, the man whose beauty parlor I go to (where they now drop in regularly, to say hello and check on the beauty products). And Yuli, who came to this country from Mexico when she was about the age of Birtukan, and knows well, she told me, what it feels like to be unable to say all the things you want (or any of them) in a new and unfamiliar language. And Barrie, the swimming teacher, and Lindsey, the ESL teacher, and Jasmine, who cooks them Haitian food and braids their hair, and Cathryn, my friend whose house sits conveniently on the bike path where we work on riding, and Laurie, who cooked them their beloved Ethiopian injera bread, and Bridget, my son Willy’s best friend from high school, who has become like a big sister. And David, who takes out coins and teaches them the value of each, and explained to them one night how his own father died long ago, when he was six. Then his mother married a very good man, whom she called “Sweetie,” and now that man is his father. “My mom died, too,” Birtukan told David and Sweetie, when they were talking about all of this the other day. Usually she speaks in a voice that can be heard from rooms away, but this time she spoke softly. “I have a new mom now.” And new siblings--not that they can ever replace the well-loved brothers back home. Each of my two sons paid us a visit, and they all danced and sang and played ball and dug in the sand at the beach and the girls fell in love with them. The girls have five brothers now, they say--three in Ethiopia, two in America, and a new sister, my daughter Audrey, though they have not gotten to meet her yet. One of the boys--my son Will--left his Boston Terrier, Tuck, in our care while he took off on a trip. Before coming here, the girls were afraid of dogs, but every night for the next two months Tuck slept with them, and we all cried when he went back to Will. There have been, over these months, times of such extraordinary sweetness that words fail me when I try to describe them. When I think about where my daughters have come from and what their future might have held, I shiver. I can no longer imagine a life without them. But it is also a hard truth that sometimes (when I got pneumonia this past spring, and every step I took felt like an effort) I look back at my old life, before the girls came, and consider the possibility that this choice may simply have been more than I could handle. I have seldom felt greater despair than I have in the past few months--when my patience gave out, or my energy, or my faith that there will ever be enough hours in the day to take care of everything I need to do, or dollars in the bank to pay for it. I miss what has come to seem like the huge luxury of ten minutes on the phone with a friend, or five minutes to get dressed, alone. I pull up to school to pick up my daughters, and see a mother in the car ahead of me, young enough to be my daughter, herself. I run into a friend who’s off to Italy, and another, headed for a weeklong yoga retreat, and catch a reflection of my tousled self in a mirror. What happened to my life? It’s still there, really--just a lot more hectic. And not everything that happens in it is about the fact of having brought two amazing new children into my family, either (thank God). In February--assisted by Ann Hood, Hope Edelman and Francesco Sedita--I ran my ninth Lake Atitlan Writing Workshop in Guatemala. Possibly our best ever (though I end up feeling that way every time). In March, with the help of two baking friends, I hosted a pie-baking fundraiser for Dr. Paul Farmer’s Partners in Health based in Haiti. Over the course of one long and flour-filled afternoon, fifty pie bakers passed through my kitchen, raising over ten thousand dollars for Haitian relief. Many of the contributions that brought us over our goal came from readers of this letter. So, once again--and belatedly--thank you. The month of April brought devastating news: the sudden death of a young woman who was my daughter Audrey’s best friend in New Hampshire, through an inexplicable act of violence that left her husband, family, and a wide and loving community of friends in a state of profound sorrow and disbelief. I flew to New Hampshire to attend the service, and to be there with Audrey, who has continued to work through her grief in the most positive and life-affirming way I could envision. She marked the loss of her friend in a manner utterly like herself, by planting a garden and chopping off her waist-length hair, and making sure she locates joy in every day. I learn daily by her own extraordinarily positive example. Sixteen months have passed now since I first laid eyes on Almaz and Birtukan, in a fuzzy photograph that came to me in an email. It’s been a full year since the gates first swung open at the orphanage, when I paid them a visit (and for the next five days we danced to Michael Jackson and brushed each others’ hair). “I promise I’ll be back” I told them, when I flew home, alone, that July. There was no way of explaining to them then what six months would look like, or what I meant when I told them “America. January. Airplane.” Now here we are—July again—and they know how to go through the metal detectors, know the words to all the songs that come on the radio, and how to work my iPhone. I had spent those six months getting ready, but of course there is no getting ready for the uncharted territory of parenthood: the remark of a girl, in a town we visited, “That’s not really your mother. You should go back to Africa where you came from.” My younger daughter’s longing for hair like mine. Her quiet observation, as we drive along one day in early June, shortly before the much-touted holiday of Father’s Day, “I have no father.” Her look of loneliness and longing at a gathering of girls, talking fast and sharing frozen yogurt sundaes, as she sits, alone, on the bench. She cannot speak well enough, yet, to feel comfortable joining them. After years on my own, I live by the school calendar again. In June, when classes ended, the girls and I headed east for a month at the ocean, to be followed--starting in ten days or so--by three weeks in my home state of New Hampshire. We’ll be attending family camp on The Isles of Shoals, where I am also slated to be a guest writer at the University of Southern N.H. M.F.A. program. My main goals for the two weeks after that are to introduce the girls to their big sister, pick lots of blueberries, bake some pies, eat fresh picked corn, see old friends, and let no day pass without swimming. I am happy to say that my two new daughters--children of a land-locked country, who had not set foot in a lake or pool before we met--are beautiful swimmers now. And the training wheels are off the bicycles. We sail down the street together now as if we owned it. Of course, with all that they have learned--and perhaps with their greater level of security in their new surroundings--there are many battles now. More than there were in those early days, when their behavior was unnaturally good, and so long as they were pressed up next to me, they asked for nothing more. There is an adolescent girl in this family again, and a feisty seven year old who wept bitter tears the other night when, for the first time in her life on earth, she had to sleep alone in a room, because her beloved older sister wanted her own space. I lay down with her for a long time, but in the end, she got to sleep--waking with the request that I turn on my computer and let her watch one of her favorite videos on You Tube. Sometimes it will be one of the hip hop songs Charlie’s recorded with his band, The Beatards, whose lyrics she has mostly memorized, though (thankfully in some cases) may not fully understand. Sometimes she wants to watch a clip from Cinderella that she’s seen about two hundred times. Her new favorite clip is one of Dolly Parton (one of my favorites too) singing a song I picked out to play for her, knowing the story it told would speak in a deep way to a little girl from a tiny hut in Africa. The song--one that still makes me cry when I hear it--is “Coat of Many Colors”. It’s the true story of how, lacking money for a coat, Dolly’s mother had stitched one together from a bag of scraps, telling her the story of Joseph’s coat of many colors as she sewed--and of how proudly Dolly had worn the coat to school, and how confused she’d felt when children laughed at her for wearing it. “Although we had no money, I was rich as I could be,” my seven-year-old Ethiopian-American daughter sings, quietly, along with the video, with her eyes locked on the image of Dolly Parton in her blonde wig and those flashy clothes that, to Birtukan, look just like what a princess would wear. We are stitching it together here, alright. Life at the moment may never have been harder. And never richer. I do not intend to miss a moment of it. With friendship Joyce PS. 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A LETTER FROM JOYCE:

July 21, 2010

The Good Daughters HarperCollins Publishers Release date: Aug 24 View tour dates... Read more about Joyce’s brand new novel and pre-order you copy by clicking on the book’s cover below.NEW_RELEASE.htmlshapeimage_4_link_0
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