What we're writing: Hallie starts with Mother's advice...

HALLIE EPHRON: As most of you know, I'm starting a year as my town (Milton, MA) public library's "Writer in Residence," and so far I am enoying myself thoroughly. I gave a talk introducing myself, and a few nights ago I got to introduce and lob questions at Pulitzer-winning author Geraldine Brooks to a full auditorium. She gave a fascinating talk about her new book, HORSE, which I heartily recommend.

Here's the publisher's description

A discarded painting in a junk pile, a skeleton in an attic, and the greatest racehorse in American history: from these strands, she braids a sweeping story of art and science, love and obsession, the human-animal bond, the legacy of enslavement and our unfinished reckoning with racism

To prepare, I read the book, of course. Then I listened to Geraldine Brooks talking about HORSE. She begins: "I have always loved horses..."

Irresistible, right?

Of course introducing an author of Brooks's stature is... daunting. Not so daunting, mind you, that it left me tongue tied. Just prop me up in front of a group of people and my ON button engages immediately.

But back to me... My "residency" has kickstarted a writing project to pull together the plethora (love that word... and how often do you get to use it?) personal essays I've written since the beginning. I'm test driving my axiom: "Today's crap is tomorrow's compost."

Not surprisingly, I've found my mother comes up over and over in my written words. Here's a picture of the two of us at my high school graduation.

And here's a start to what I envision as an introduction to... me.

I come from a family of writers, but for the longest time, I insisted I was the one who didn’t write.

When I told my mother that I wanted to be a teacher, she was horrified. She was a screenwriter at a time when it was a rare woman who worked as anything but a secretary in the movie business—which was what she’d been when my parents first married. My dad was a Broadway stage manager who dreamed of being a playwright.

When my mother had gotten pregnant with my sister Nora and had to quit her job, my dad convinced her to collaborate with him on a play. Three is a Family was about a young couple and their baby who have to move into her parents’ apartment which becomes crowded with other quirky relatives. A wartime farce, it debuted on Broadway in 1943 and ran for nearly 500 performances.

I can only imagine how thrilling it must have been to have their play produced. There they were, barely into their thirties, backstage at the Longacre Theatre being congratulated by Eleanor Roosevelt. 

Then Hollywood came calling, and my parents career as a husband-and-wife screenwriting team was launched.

They wrote the screenplay for the slightly renamed 3 IS A FAMILY, sharing the credit with a more experienced screenwriter, Harry Chandlee. They went on to write at least 17 movies and two more Broadway plays.

They co-authored scripts with my father pacing the room, acting out all the parts, as my mother took shorthand. Then he’d go to the tennis club while she stayed home and turned her notes into a script, typing an original and two copysets.

For all my mother’s forward thinking and her success in a male dominated profession, she urged me to learn to touch type and take shorthand (“Because you never know when you’ll have to fall back on it.”) So I did. And used it occasionally during summer jobs as an office temp.

But my wanting to be a teacher was a bridge too far. She made me promise that, when I got college, I would not take any education courses. Save that for graduate school, she counseled--hoping, I’m sure, that by then I’d have come to my senses.

I did not.

So today's burning question: Did you ever receive advice that you followed (or decided NOT to follow), and how did that work out for you?