Jane Heller

New York Times and USA Today Bestselling Author

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My New Motto: Life Is Too Short to Finish Books and Anything Else That Doesn't Satisfy

September 17, 2015

sm-bottom-view

I must be getting wiser in my Medicare age. I used to feel compelled to finish virtually everything. I used to sit there watching movies that were boring me or annoying me or giving me no pleasure or escape. I used to at least try to eat everything on my plate in restaurants even if the food wasn’t especially good simply because I was paying for it. And I used to finish every book I bought – 100% of the time. I’m a writer. I felt it was a courtesy to my fellow authors to finish their work – the work I’m sure they’d labored over just as I labor over mine.

Not anymore. If I find myself saying, 50 pages into a book, “I’m not relating to these characters” or “This story is going nowhere” or “This writing leaves me cold,” I put the book down and move on to the next one in my queue. What a feeling of liberation!

Broadening this approach, I’ve also figured out that I don’t have to like everybody and everybody doesn’t have to like me – and I’m not talking about Facebook “likes.” I had a very disagreeable phone conversation with one of my new neighbors recently. At first her attitude stunned me. And then I said, “F*^k it.” I’m learning that even a pleaser like me doesn’t have to befriend everyone. Time is not to be wasted on people who are negative and, in the case of the neighbor, downright nasty. And friends who no longer behave like friends – people who aren’t supportive when things are going well or when they’re not – have no place in my life and it’s O.K. to let them go. I don’t love getting older, but I do love being able to say, as the writer Dominique Browning put it in her terrific piece in The New York Times, “I’m too old for this.” She was speaking primarily of our constant criticisms of our appearance, but the piece resonated with so many people that it was one of the top-viewed Op-Eds the week it ran. Here’s a look.

Fashion & Style | First Person
I’m Too Old for This

By DOMINIQUE BROWNING AUG. 8, 2015

There is a lot that is annoying, and even terrible, about aging. The creakiness of the body; the drifting of the memory; the reprising of personal history ad nauseam, with only yourself to listen.

But there is also something profoundly liberating about aging: an attitude, one that comes hard won. Only when you hit 60 can you begin to say, with great aplomb: “I’m too old for this.”

This line is about to become my personal mantra. I have been rehearsing it vigorously, amazed at how amply I now shrug off annoyances that once would have knocked me off my perch.

A younger woman advised me that “old” may be the wrong word, that I should consider I’m too wise for this, or too smart. But old is the word I want. I’ve earned it.

And let’s just start with being an older woman, shall we? Let others feel bad about their chicken wings — and their bottoms, their necks and their multitude of creases and wrinkles. I’m too old for this. I spent years, starting before I was a teenager, feeling insecure about my looks.

No feature was spared. My hairline: Why did I have to have a widow’s peak, at 10? My toes: too short. My entire body: too fat, and once, even, in the depths of heartbreak, much too thin. Nothing felt right. Well, O.K., I appreciated my ankles. But that’s about it.

What torture we inflict upon ourselves. If we don’t whip ourselves into loathing, then mean girls, hidden like trolls under every one of life’s bridges, will do it for us.

Even the vogue for strange-looking models is little comfort; those women look perfectly, beautifully strange, in a way that no one else does. Otherwise we would all be modeling.

One day recently I emptied out an old trunk. It had been locked for years; I had lost the key and forgotten what was in there. But, curiosity getting the best of me on a rainy afternoon, I managed to pry it open with a screwdriver.

It was full of photographs. There I was, ages 4 to 40. And I saw for the first time that even when I was in the depths of despair about my looks, I had been beautiful.

And there were all my friends; girls and women with whom I had commiserated countless times about hair, weight, all of it, doling out sympathy and praise, just as I expected it heaped upon me: beautiful, too. We were, we are, all beautiful. Just like our mothers told us, or should have. (Ahem.)

Those smiles, radiant with youth, twinkled out of the past, reminding me of the smiles I know today, radiant with strength.

Young(er) women, take this to heart: Why waste time and energy on insecurity? I have no doubt that when I’m 80 I’ll look at pictures of myself when I was 60 and think how young I was then, how filled with joy and beauty.

I’m happy to have a body that is healthy, that gets me where I want to go, that maybe sags and complains, but hangs in there. So maybe I’m too old for skintight jeans, too old for six-inch stilettos, too old for tattoos and too old for green hair.

Weight gain? Simply move to the looser end of the wardrobe, and stop hanging with Ben and Jerry. No big deal. Nothing to lose sleep over. Anyway, I’m too old for sleep, or so it seems most nights.

Which leaves me a bit cranky in the daytime, so it is a good thing I can now work from home. Office politics? Sexism? I’ve seen it all. Watching men make more money, doing less work. Reading the tea leaves as positions shuffle, listening to the kowtow and mumble of stifled resentment.

I want to tell my younger colleagues that it doesn’t matter. Except the sexism, which, like poison ivy, is deep-rooted: You weed the rampant stuff, but it pops up again.

What matters most is the work. Does it give you pleasure, or hope? Does it sustain your soul? My work as a climate activist is the hardest and most fascinating I’ve ever done. I’m too old for the dark forces, for hopelessness and despair. If everyone just kept their eyes on the ball, and followed through each swing, we’d all be more productive, and not just on the golf course.

The key to life is resilience, and I’m old enough to make such a bald statement. We will always be knocked down. It’s the getting up that counts. By the time you reach upper middle age, you have started over, and over again.

And, I might add, resilience is the key to feeling 15 again. Which is actually how I feel most of the time.

But I am too old to try to change people. By now I’ve learned, the very hard way, that what you see in someone at the beginning is what you get forevermore. Most of us are receptive to a bit of behavior modification. But through decades of listening to people complain about marriages or lovers, I hear the same refrains.

I have come to realize that there is comfort in the predictability, even the ritualization, of relationship problems. They become a dance step; each partner can twirl through familiar moves, and do-si-do until the music stops.

Toxic people? Sour, spoiled people? I’m simply walking away; I have little fight left in me. It’s easier all around to accept that friendships have ebbs and flows, and indeed, there’s something quite beautiful about the organic nature of love.

I used to think that one didn’t make friends as one got older, but I’ve learned that the opposite happens. Sometimes, unaccountably, a new person walks into your life, and you find you are never too old to love again. And again. (See resilience.)

One is never too old for desire. Having entered the twilight of my dating years, I can tell you it is much easier to navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of anticipation and disappointment when you’ve had plenty of experience with the shoals and eddies of shallow waters. Emphasis on shallow. By now, we know deep.

Take a pass on bad manners, on thoughtlessness, on unreliability, on carelessness and on all the other ways people distinguish themselves as unappealing specimens. Take a pass on your own unappealing behavior, too: the pining, yearning, longing and otherwise frittering away of valuable brainwaves that could be spent on Sudoku, or at least a jigsaw puzzle, if not that Beethoven sonata you loved so well in college.

My new mantra is liberating. At least once a week I encounter a situation that in the old (young) days would have knocked me to my knees or otherwise spun my life off center.

Now I can spot trouble 10 feet away (believe me, this is a big improvement), and I can say to myself: Too old for this. I spare myself a great deal of suffering, and as we all know, there is plenty of that to be had without looking for more.

If there can be such a thing as a best-selling app like Yo, which satisfies so many urges to boldly announce ourselves, I want one called 2old4this. A signature kiss-off to all that was once vexatious. A goodbye to all that has done nothing but hold us back. That would be an app worth having. But, thankfully, I’m too old to need such a thing.

 

Filed Under: Humor, Mainly Jane Tagged With: Aging, books, Dominique Browning, movies, New York Times

Oscar Food Should Be Rich….

February 24, 2014

short ribs

I hardly ever eat red meat anymore, but when it comes to special occasions and the tastes of my guests – and it’s watch-the-Oscars night at my house – I serve beef. This year the menu will feature beef short ribs. I’ll be using Ina Garten’s recipe, which is as bullet-proof as it gets and not only can be made the day before but is more flavorful when cooked ahead. I don’t use the whole bottle of wine as she does in the video, nor do I pour in as much broth, and I add more carrots plus my secret ingredient: cremini mushrooms. The result is delicious with the meat falling off the bone and the sauce perfectly suited to the mashed potatoes accompaniment. There will also be a Caesar salad without the eggs and anchovies (sounds sacrilegious, I know, but that’s how I roll when it comes to Caesar dressing), garlic bread and a chocolate something for dessert (one of our friends is bringing it). To start I’ll pull together some appetizers: hummus, guacamole, olives, cheeses or a combo of all. I always make sure to have enough for everybody and often overdo it. But hey, that way there are leftovers. :)

Filed Under: Food, Mainly Jane, Movies Tagged With: Academy Awards, dinner parties, food, Ina Garten, menu, movies, Oscars, short ribs

Movie Night: "Blue Caprice"

October 5, 2013

Blue Caprice 55

Who can forget the notorious “Beltway snipers,” who shot and killed random people in the D.C. area and terrorized everybody. Now comes “Blue Caprice,” named for the car that eluded police for too long because of its “invisibility” as opposed to the white van the killers were supposedly holed up in. It’s based on the real story and begins with actual news footage overlaid by audio of the 911 calls, but it seeks not to give us a biopic or docu-style thriller but rather a character study of John Allen Muhammed and his young protegee, Lee Boyd Malvo.

It begins on the Caribbean island of Antigua where Malvo has been abandoned by this mother and wanders the streets aimlessly – until he meets Muhammed, an American ex-military man who’s frolicking on the beach with his three kids. Muhammed seems like the ideal father and soon Malvo is falling under his spell. When it turns out that Muhammed has kidnapped the three kids and eventually has to return them to their mother, Malvo buys the older man’s story that he’s being persecuted unfairly by, well, just about everyone. Muhammed is a man who, it becomes clearer and clearer, is psychotic with rages about his ex-wife, his country, his race, you name it. It’s all everybody else’s fault. Malvo lives with him in the Tacoma, Washington area for awhile, staying here and there, learning to become an expert shooter. Their relationship is a complicated father-son one as Muhammed preys on the boy’s vulnerability and neediness. Their drive to the D.C. area and the killings themselves only happen after we’re two-thirds into the film and they’re not the focal point. The director is clearly trying to get inside their heads, and in that sense the movie works well.

Isaiah Washington, who plays Muhammed and executive produced the film, is truly haunting and in another Oscar season, not as loaded with great performances in bigger films, he might have been singled out for his. And I liked that the film didn’t go for sensationalism and violence. It’s about violent people but didn’t take the bloody route. Still, it moved at a snail’s pace and ultimately left me wondering why bother.

 

Filed Under: Mainly Jane, Movies Tagged With: Beltway snipers, Blue Caprice, Isaiah Washington, movies

This Article Really Depressed Me

June 14, 2011

And I’m still depressed, even though it’s been two days since I read the article.

It was in Sunday’s New York Times and it was film critic Manohla Dargis’ take on the fact that women are a disappearing breed in the movies nowadays and that they’ll be even more invisible this summer. Although I know Dargis is right and I spend way too much time bemoaning the scarcity of women on the big screen, it still bummed me out to read her piece.

For example, her first paragraph:

“If you’re a woman who roared, snorted or sniggered at “Bridesmaids,” if you like watching other women on screen, you should see it again. Because that hit comedy written by Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo and directed by Paul Feig, turns out to be one of the few occasions this summer when you can enjoy a movie about and with women released by a major studio.”

What does this all mean for screen adaptations of my novels? Nothing good. I’ve been told by any number of “industry people” that rom coms are over, that movies for women must be raunchy like “Bridesmaids” or they won’t get made, that stories about women don’t sell overseas, that women will go to see men in films but men won’t go to see women.

How did we get here? And more importantly, how do we get out of here? I loved Nora Ephron’s movies and I could watch appealing actresses fall in and out of love with the men of their dreams every night of the week. Am I a disappearing breed too?

 

 

 

Filed Under: Mainly Jane, Movies Tagged With: Bridesmaids, Manohla Dargis, movies, New York Times, Nora Ephron, women

Why I Won't Be Seeing "Hangover 2" This Holiday Weekend

May 26, 2011

I mean seriously. Take a look.

Does it not seem that what the writers/producers/studio did was copy the script from the original movie and tweak it ever so slightly?

  1. It’s the same guys.
  2. Yet again, one of them is about to get married.
  3. They take a bachelor party trip.
  4. They get so drunk they wake up the next morning and can’t remember what happened.
  5. They find a monkey in their hotel room instead of a tiger.
  6. Instead of broken teeth, the character who’s a dentist has a tattoo on his face.
  7. They set about trying to figure out what happened the night before.
  8. The fiancee calls frantically to say, “Where are you???”
  9. High jinks ensue.
  10. They come home.
  11. Funny pics accompany the end credits.

I usually defend the movie business when people say, “There’s no originality in Hollywood anymore.” Not this time. Even I have my limits.

But don’t take my word for it. Read today’s review in The New York Times.

 

 

Filed Under: Humor, Mainly Jane, Movies, Popular culture, Screenplays Tagged With: Hangover, Hangover 2, Hollywood, movies

RIP, Sidney Lumet

April 10, 2011

I’m a day or two late, but I did want to acknowledge the death of yet another Hollywood legend. Actually, Sidney Lumet was the quintessential New Yorker, but he made movies that were as critically acclaimed as they were commercially viable. “Network” is my favorite of his films, but I love “The Verdict” too.

Lumet’s films won Oscars for so many of the actors who starred in them and yet he never won a Best Director statue himself (not counting the lame Lifetime Achievement Award).

Here’s a clip reel of his best work via The Daily Beast. Enjoy.

Filed Under: Mainly Jane, Movies Tagged With: Academy Awards, movies, Network, Sidney Lumet, The Verdict

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About Jane Heller

Jane Heller is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author. Her fourteen breezy, witty novels of romantic comedy and suspense are now entertaining millions of readers around the world, along with her two books of nonfiction.

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