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Marley and Me
Publishers Weekly reviews 'The Longest Trip Home'
This starred review appeared today in Publishers Weekly magazine. I was thrilled to see the star beside it. Back in 2005, Publishers Weekly gave Marley & Me a positive review, but the coveted PW star eluded me. So this made my Labor Day.
Here's PW's review:
*
(Starred) The Longest Trip Home John Grogan. Morrow, $25.95 (336p) ISBN 978-0-06-171324-8
Grogan follows up Marley & Me with a hilarious and touching memoir of his childhood in suburban Detroit.
"To say my parents were devout Catholics is like saying the sun runs a little hot," he writes. "It defined who they were." Grogan and his three siblings grew up in a house full of saints' effigies, attended a school run by ruler-wielding nuns and even spent family vacations at religious shrines, chapels and monasteries. Grogan defied his upbringing through each coming-of-age milestone: his first impure thoughts, which he couldn't bare to divulge at his First Confession (the priest was a family friend); his first buzz from the communion wine he chugged with his fellow altar boys; and his coming to know women in the biblical sense. As Grogan matured, his unease with Church doctrine grew, and he realized he'd never share his parents' religious zeal.
Telling them he's joined the ranks of the nonpracticing Catholics, however, is much easier said than done, even in adulthood. At 30, he fell in love with a Protestant, moved in with her and then married her -- a sequence of events that crushed his parents. In this tenderly told story, Grogan considers the rift between the family he's made and the family that made him --and how to bridge the two. (Oct.)
http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6591186.html?industryid=47159
The Accidental Gardener
If you've followed my back-story at all, you know I am a pretty enthusiastic gardener. Or was, at any rate. So enthusiastic, in fact, I quit a dream job as a section-front metropolitan newspaper columnist to try my hand as editor of Organic Gardening magazine. In Marley & Me, I describe how I quickly realized that career move was a mistake – that it is never a good idea to try to blend your hobby with your vocation. What I didn't say in the book was that during those years I was at OG (1999-2002) I threw myself into gardening with abandon. I planted big perennial beds. I sprouted hard-to-grow seeds in my basement over heating mats and beneath fluorescent lights. I tilled up large swaths of the backyard and planted corn and tomatoes and garlic and melons and pumpkins and squash and beans. I fussed over giant piles of decomposing green matter -- the stuff of compost -- stirring and fluffing and adding pinches of water and various ingredients like a chef perfecting a soufflé. I picked tomatoes by the bushel and experimented with the best way to preserve them, cooking them down into sauces that I canned and froze.
The gardening part of the job was a blast. It was the "putting out the magazine" part that wasn’t tremendously challenging or rewarding.
Flash forward six years. I found my way to another columnist job --at the Philadelphia Inquirer -- then on to write Marley & Me, and now to have just finished my new book, The Longest Trip Home, which comes out October 21. Along the way, I got mighty busy and more or less let the gardening go. It was a luxury I no longer had time for. I kept up on the weeding and trimming, but stopped planting vegetables and annual flowers, except for a few tomatoes and zinnias. I even returned several garden beds to lawn.
This fallen-away gardener has only one thing to say: Thank goodness for volunteer seedlings and steadfast perennials. Even in my gardening hiatus, I am still finding pleasant surprises around our property because of those two gifts. The perennial beds come back every year, even when ignored, giving me a bounty of flowers to cut -- peonies, phlox, purple coneflower, daisies, Joe Pye weed, bee balm, and on and on – and good things to eat -- rhubarb, fennel, blueberries, raspberries, cherries, grapes. I just came back from a stroll around the property with a bucket of fat, juicy blackberries, at once sweet and tart. My neighbor Digger Dan (he is the guy in Marley & Me who warns me about naming chickens) gave me canes he dug up from his garden several years ago. In the fall there will be apples and pears, too.
The volunteer seedlings -- basically any plant that comes up from a seed dropped from last year's plants or fallen fruit -- also offer surprises. Snaking through a bed of ornamental grasses by the driveway, I found a giant pumpkin vine. I followed it for twenty feet before discovering two plump green pumpkins. They are already nearly the size of basketballs, so by Halloween they should be memorable. Various flowers have also come up from last year's seeds, including a number of sunflowers, bachelor buttons, and marigolds. My philosophy is to let things grow where they sprout. It's bedlam out there, but in a happy sort of way.
This season, I did find time to put in six tomato plants (now coming on strong), six kale plants (I love the crinkly blue-green leaves sautéed in olive oil and garlic), a couple rows of garlic (just harvested), and my two favorite annual flowers – sunflowers and zinnias. Of course, the neighbors give us more zucchini than we can use.
Anyway, that's it from eastern Pennsylvania on this muggy August evening. Hope everyone is similarly enjoying the summer. Thanks for all the notes about the new book and the cover. I appreciate all of your feedback.
Houston, we have a cover!
As I described in my last entry, my new memoir, "The Longest Trip Home," is coming out on Oct. 21. Things are clicking along rapidly now on the road to publication, and just last week we settled on a cover. I thought I'd share it with you and ask your opinion. It's hard to tell from this jpeg, but the green will be a rich matte finish, and the black-and-white photo will be glossy. The gold type is embossed foil, which really looks sharp on the flat green, I think.
Anyway, here it is, the official cover of The Longest Trip Home. I'm thrilled with it. Kudos to the art department at William Morrow, my publisher. And yes, that little kid in the photo is yours truly, on the floor of my childhood home, in 1959 when I was 2 years old. Man, did I love that cowboy shirt!
By the way, please know that I read every single message left here on my blog. I can't respond to them all, but I do read them and really enjoy what all of you have to say. Whether you are writing from the next town over or from Brazil or Japan or Italy or Australia, I love hearing from you. Thanks for all the messages!
-- John
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