Tuesday, June 5, 2018

Year of Yes: How to Dance it Out, Stand in the Sun and Be Your Own Person by Shonda Rhimes



by Shonda Rhimes

I started watching Grey’s Anatomy, created by Shonda Rhimes, back when it first went on the air and was immediately in love with the writing. I adored the characters of Meredith Grey and Christina Yang. I loved George. I watched it every Thursday for years, until life intervened. Six months ago, I started going back and watching it from the beginning, as time permits. (Which means I’m only through episode five or so.) But the writing still inspires me.

A friend recommended this book to me a year or more ago but it took me this long to pick it up; I'm sorry I waited. It was wonderful! As a woman, writer, and mother, there was so much that resonated for me. I found it truly inspirational and just plain fun.

Now, Rhimes starts out by saying that she loves to lie, but I find more truth in her fiction than a lot of other places in life.

Her tone is completely conversational, as if you were right there with her. About having to choose between toilet paper and red wine and the toilet paper not always winning, she says,  “Did I just see you give me a look? Was that . . . did you just judge me? No, you are not about to come up into this book and judge me. That is not how we are going to start off this journey.”

Gotta love it. I’m not sure I know how to write a review of this book that could possibly be better than the woman’s own words, so forgive me if this is mostly quotes. I’ll editorialize where I can.

“There’s a hum that happens inside my head when I hit a certain writing rhythm, a certain speed. When laying track goes from feeling like climbing a mountain on my hands and knees to feeling like flying effortlessly through the air. Like breaking the sound barrier. Everything inside me just shifts. I break the writing barrier. And the feeling of laying track changes, transforms, shifts from exertion into exultation.”

I call it the writer’s high. It’s incredible and I totally agree.

The book, the year, started with her sister telling her, “You never say yes to anything.”

Shonda is an introvert, an extreme introvert, highly gifted with words and, it seems to me, highly intelligent. Saying yes to things is terrifying, but she begins doing it anyway, even if it finds her “licking the dust at the bottom of the Xanax bottle because oh yeah, I don’t take Xanax anymore, it’s been twelve years since Xanax was my friend.”

She says yes to giving the commencement speech at Dartmouth, hyperventilates and forgets about it for five and a half months, leaving her two weeks to write the speech.

“When I first got a publicist, I told him and his team that my main reason for having a publicist was so that I never ever had to do any publicity. Everyone thought this was a joke. I was not joking.”

“It’s one thing for people to know you are nervous and have stage fright. They are sympathetic to that. But how do you admit to people that you don’t remember the biggest interview of your career? That is weird.”

But this is who she is. Nature or nurture? I think largely nature and her parents let her be her own person.

“I was just an unusual kid. Lucky for me, my parents held unusual in high regard. And so when I wanted to play with the cans in the pantry for hours on end, my mother didn’t tell me to stop messing around with the food and go somewhere else to play. Instead, she declared it a sign of creativity, closed the pantry door and let me be.”

Lucky for all of us.

“As Watergate played out on the tiny black and white set my mother had dragged into the kitchen and balanced on a chair just outside the pantry doors, my three-year-old imagination made a world of its own. The big cans of yams ruled over the peas and green beans while the tiny citizens of Tomato Paste Land planned a revolution designed to overthrow the government. There were hearings and failed assassination attempts and resignations . . . Man, that pantry was fun.

Being asked to be on Jimmy Kimmel? Not so much.

“My left eye starts to twitch. I tell myself that it’s okay, because it is twitching only in what I am sure is the tiniest, most unnoticeable way. Nobody can tell it is twitching but me.

‘Wow, your eye is really twitching,’ Joan Rater, head writer at Grey’s anatomy, informs me with great authority. The whole writing staff crows around to peer at my eyeball jumping around in my head.

‘Honey,’ my toddler, Emerson, takes my face in her hands and gravely informs me, ‘your eye is broken. It’s busted, honey.’”

The Mommy Scorecard, kids, dreams and doing. This book is a memoir based around the idea of saying yes, so it’s a series of vignettes that are interrelated but not necessarily following one right into another. It’s a window on her world -  vivid, honest, engaging, funny and wonderful. I’m so glad she decided to share it. Take advantage of that.

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